Pinecones
by WhiteLadyDragon
Summary: Growing up is like eating pinecones: it's painful. Love cannot take the pain away, nor eat the pinecones for you, but squeezing its hand, even slightly, makes it a bit more bearable. Sequel to "Cheap Laugh", Zane x OC. COMPLETED!
1. Act One

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_Awright, the sequel! Any comments and/ or constructive criticism you have is immensely appreciated. From this point on, the story revolves around the events of episodes 163 through 166._

_**Act One**_

_Snap! _

"Aw, donuts!" Sara squinted at the broken pencil tip as she held it up to her nose. Her hand trembled with what felt like the worst bout of writer's cramp she had ever experienced, mostly since she never actually worked that hard before on schoolwork. What other way to pass the time than do homework or extra credit? They forbade ducking around in detention hall, and her marks really could use the boost.

Professor Sartyr, her supervisor for her sentence, snapped his fingers. "Hey, hey! No cursing in detention hall."

Sara looked up. "I wasn't cursing. 'Donuts' is not a curse word, is it?" She shuffled out of her seat. "I broke my pencil."

"Again?" sighed the head of the Ra dorm. "All right, come down here to use the sharpener."

As she ambled down the empty classroom to the teacher's desk, she held out the pencil at arm's length, while her cramping hand twitched at her side. With a wince, she wondered out loud: "Has it been four weeks yet?"

Professor Sartyr shook his head. "It's only been four _days_, Senorita. I'm sorry," he replied with a sympathetic smile. When she handed him the pencil, he pushed it into the sharpener. Sara knew why he was doing this rather than she do it herself. She had a slight habit of keeping the pencil in the sharpener so it would get shorter and shorter until there'd be nothing left but a useless nub. She liked how the vibrations felt in her palm, almost like a massage. A message was sure something she could've used at the moment.

_Rrrrrrrr…_

While Sartyr preoccupied himself with the device, Sara noticed the steaming mug of tea on the far corner of the desk. Shoving her tongue into her left cheek, she asked, "Can I borrow that drink?"

"You mean, my tea? Well, I suppose if you're thirsty, you may have a sip." He didn't look up from the sharpener as he pushed the utensil back in there to sharpen the point. This gave Sara the chance to not drink from the mug, but dip her sore hand into it. Hot water was supposed to remedy any cramp, right? Tea was hot water with color and flavor.

Sara flashed a relieved smile; the lukewarm tea did help to soothe the ache in her joints. In what little space she had, she wiggled her fingertips. "Ahhhhh…"

But just as she was getting comfortable, Sartyr popped up with the freshly sharp pencil. "There you are, Senorita: good as new."

Right when he spoke up, Sara yanked out her hand, sprinkling a trail of dark droplets all over the desk. She wiped her hand dry on the seat of her skirt as her other hand plucked the pencil out of the teacher's. "Grace-eyes, Sarty, you're a peach!" She turned around to go back to her seat, feeling much better, while he reached for his mug to take a sip.

Professor Sartyr smacked his lips. "Strange, my tea tastes like sweat and eraser bits."

Silpheed threw Sara a sly look from the inside of her jacket. There were two places in school where Silpheed was forbidden: detention and class. But Sara had always smuggled him in her jacket, so long as he kept his voice barely above a whisper and spoke only when no one else was looking. His reward was a Silpheed Snack every time.

"Dirty girl, _rawk._"

"What? My hand was cramping up real bad," Sara blushed. "He said I could."

_Rrrrrrm! _

The floor suddenly began to tremble underneath their feet! Though it lasted only for four seconds, Sara clung to the edge of her seat for dear life, hugging Silpheed close. "_Yiiiaaah, _it's happening again! The aliens are back!"

"The day the Earth stood still! _RAWK!_"

Professor Sartyr didn't scream in terror, but he looked as white as a snowflake. "What in the world--!?"

Just then, Dimitri popped his spiky head through the door. Floods of students and teachers were rushing behind him. "Professor, come outside! Something's happened!"

"_Ay carumba!" _Sartyr jumped right out of his seat and left the room, and though it wasn't allowed to leave detention hall before being officially dismissed, Sara and Silpheed followed closely behind.

The hullaballoo was not just that brief earthquake, but that someone had seen a bolt of white light strike somewhere out in the woods at about the same time. Fearing that another inter-dimensional incident would happen, everyone in school had to drop what they were doing and race to the sight. The trek took them all to the ancient ruins in the heart of the forest, where they found amongst the hills of smoke and vines and rubble a cluster of beings. No, not aliens--thank goodness--but fellow Duel Academy students, the more prominent ones who had been missing for several days, plus Dr. Crowler and Aster Phoenix and three of the exchange students.

Everyone choked with speechlessness at the sight before them, like they had seen a transfiguration. Being at the back of the crowd, Sara and Silpheed squeezed through them all to see what the matter was. When they did, their jaws fell off their hinges.

"Mother of Mirth, where the heck have you guys been?!"

At first, none of them answered; considering everything they had been through, they were about too tired to. Jesse Andersen was practically hanging over a tittering Dr. Crowler like a dead goose (and what a peculiar black costume he had on; he looked like a bondage slave!). Alexis and Atticus Rhodes clung to each other for support, Aster was on one knee, and Jim, Axel, and Chazz managed to find their footing, though the glazed look in their eyes betrayed their weariness. Syrus and Hassleberry were at the far back: Hassleberry turned to Syrus, Syrus towards the sky. He seemed to be quivering, possibly from cold, as Sara guessed by the robe he was wearing.

While everyone else rushed onward to greet their heroes, Sara and Silpheed moved up to Aster, who was dusting himself off. The hardened look on his face expressed some sort of anxiety, as though something had been lost. "Aster, hey, Aster! Where'd you fellas run off to? You've been missing for days!"

He looked at her as though she were a moron. "…That's not really your business, is it?" he said flatly.

Sara paused to lean in and sniff at his jacket, causing Aster to grimace. "You smell like dust. I dunno what it is, but it's not Earth-dust. Smell it, Silpheed?"

"Oh gosh, how can you tell?" Aster mumbled.

With her tongue in her cheek, she cocked her head to the side. Something didn't feel kosher, and that wasn't just because they weren't Jewish.

"Where's Ziti? He was with you, the last time we saw him. Did he go with you? Where is he? Come to think of it, where's Jaden? And the guy that sells car insurance?"

Aster shrugged, "How should I know? I was disintegrated before I could see anything." He stepped around her without another word.

Her head sprang up like a catapult at a sudden thought. "Non-Earth-dust…missing people…disintegration…Silpheed, you don't think those guys went back to combat the alien robot vampire werecats so they wouldn't come back to bother us Earthlings again, do ya? I mean, where the heck else could they have vamoosed to? That'd explain a lot…"

Syrus hadn't moved an inch from his spot. He was Ziti's little brother; maybe he'd know something? So, the two crept over to the poor boy to discover tears rolling down his cheeks like water out of a leaking dam, his bottom lip trembling.

Sara never liked seeing people cry. People who cried looked hurt and shriveled; just watching them do it made her shrivel up in a way. Scooting in front of the lad, she asked, "You all right, little guy?"

When he opened his eyes, his face suddenly became as stiff as a mask, though the tears didn't stop. "All right? _All right? _How can I be all right," he answered in a voice that was almost too soft to hear, "when my best friend's _gone?_"

_Gone? _

Though Sara still didn't know what was going on, she placed a hand on his shoulder and worked up a smile. "You mean Jaden? M-Maybe he just took a wrong turn on the way home? Kinda like the time at Pegasus World when I went home with the wrong--"

Syrus wouldn't hear it; he tore away from her grasp and ran off in the opposite direction before she could say "family," or even ask about his brother. He must've been suffering from shell shock from the alien combat.

Before long, everyone else had escorted the heroes back to the campus, bombarding them with questions about where they'd been, and why Jaden hadn't come back. Sara was left behind with no answers, no clues, only her own guessing.

"…Silpheed, you don't think Jaden and Ziti and the Geico kid are, like, dead, do ya? I mean, Aster said he got disintegrated, and look at him."

Silpheed bobbed up and down. "_RAWK! _Dead man walking!"

"Yeah. Maybe they really did take a wrong turn? But they'll find their way back. I found my way back to our family…though the cops had to get involved. You don't think they got cops out there, do you?"

"_RAWK! _Dunno, dunno! You?"

Sara glanced up at the cloudless skies. "To be honest…I dunno, either. But we can hope, right?"

______________

A week had passed since then, and neither Jaden nor Zane had appeared (though it seemed that the student body was much more concerned about missing Jaden). For an entire week, a gloomy fog had descended over the school, even though the sun shined. And for that entire week, Sara and Silpheed spent it either in detention doing extra credit or around campus, attempting to lift the spirits of their fellow peers.

In class, Sara "farted" one too many times by getting up and sitting down on her whoopee cushion every ten minutes. Professor Mimicry wound up kicking her out in the middle of his lecture, but to go to the bathroom. He never found out that she'd been pooting through a cushion.

"Come back when you've got it all out of your system," he ordered.

"Attention whore," someone muttered as she made her way to the door. For some reason, hearing that made Sara wince.

As the door shut behind them, Silpheed peeked out from the collar of her jacket. "Hoe!"

"Now Silpheed, if she were a hoe, she would live in the tool shed and have weeds tangled up in her hair. Actually, no, she wouldn't have hair; just weeds. 'Cause her head would be shaped like a spade."

Sara slunk along the bleak white wall on the way to the bathroom, her finger trailing over it, drawing imaginary loop-de-loops and squiggles. _Man, how did Jaden do it? He cracked everyone up when _he _let one rip, even the teachers. But maybe that's because he didn't use a cushion. That guy could toot on a dime, bless his soul. _

"It's taking the boys an awful long time to get home," she muttered.

"Men don't ask directions, _RAWK!_"

"Yeah, that's true, but it took Daddy _three days_ to find Pegasus World. It's been a whole danged week, now. A whole sad week…like the lamp's gone out, and we can't find a new bulb. Hmm…" She crammed her tongue in her cheek.

Just as they entered the bathroom door, that light bulb she was looking for—_BOING!_—clicked on in her head, as she flipped the switch to turn the lights on.

She snapped her fingers. "A pajama party! That's it! There's no way anyone could still be mopey after a good ol'-fashioned slumber shindig!"

Silpheed's crest feathers grew erect at Sara's suggestion. "_RAWK! _With chicks?"

"Yes, Silpheed, with chicks, _and _dudes. There's nothing wrong with unisexity, is there?" She counted everything in an ideal slumber party on her fingers. "And popcorn, and karaoke, and soda, and lots of pillows and flashlights, and lots of space to dance around in our socks!"

"_RAWK! _And a closet! Seven Minutes in Heaven, baby!"

"And we could host it in the gym, so everyone can come. That should keep the pep alive until they finally come back."

Sara had had quite enough of writing for the moment, but she still had her voice. Thus, during the lunch period, she and Silpheed climbed on top of the counter, cupped her hands around her mouth, and addressed everyone in the cafeteria at the same time:

"PJ PARTY AT THE GYM! TONIGHT!

"CELEBRATE GOOD TIMES, _COME ON! RAWK!_"

The only one that responded to the invitation was Sadie, a girl that helped Miss Dorothy around her shop. Even so, all she said was, "Excuse me, but could you please get off the counter? I just cleaned it off."

Sara turned her head and grinned, "You're invited, too! _Everyone_ is invited! Ooh-ooh! Ooh-ooh!"

Dimitri passed by the counter, not neglecting to shoot a scowl in the pair's direction. "A PJ party? What do we look like, ten years old?"

Sara leapt off the counter and landed on her feet, while Silpheed leapt off and landed on her shoulder. "But it'll be fun, something that we need, right now. There'll be karaoke and dancing and junk food, and we could play games like Truth or Dare or Hide the Pickle in the Sandwich--"

Everyone in the cafeteria turned white with horror, except Silpheed, who bobbed up and down and basically went cuckoo. Sara looked all over the room, never the kind to enjoy silence.

She shrugged, "What? It's just a game I made up. You take a little slice of pickle and hide it in one of three sandwiches. Then you have to guess which sandwich has the pickle. What'd you think I was talking about?"

At the news, Silpheed drooped like a vulture, his crest feathers falling back on his head. "_RAAAAAWK, _that's it?

"That is _so _not funny, girl!" Jasmine scolded from the back of the room.

"Yeah! You need to grow up!" added her companion, Mindy.

And just like that, the crowd dispersed; they had pretty much lost their appetites by then. Soon, the only ones left were Sara, Silpheed, and Sadie, who had gotten so red in the face that she might as well have been Bob the Tomato's cousin. She shielded her face with her hands.

Sara cocked her head. "So…I guess we'll see you all tonight, then? Oh, yeah, I almost forgot: B.Y.O.P., people! Bring your own pillow!"

_____________

Nobody B.Y.O.P-ed. Nobody R.S.V.P-ed, either. At nine-fifteen that night in the dimly illuminated gym, the only two at the party were Silpheed and Sara, who was dressed in her best yellow PJs with Sonic Ducks running all over them. The two of them sat on a pillow with a large bowl of popcorn between them, watching the entrances for their guests. No karaoke machines were available; they had opted for an old, smelly mat from the supply closet and a boom box, instead. They set up a broad circle of soda bottles around them, because at slumber parties, everything was supposed to be on the floor.

Sara drummed her fingers on the floor. "What do you think's taking them so long? It's been two hours."

Silpheed fluffed out his feathers, cross from the lack of action. "_RAWK! _Lame! Where're all the chicks?"

Suddenly, it hit her. _"D'oh!" _She knocked her forehead with the bottom of her hand. "I just realized something: we never told the guys when the party started! Hahahaha, _woo! _Oh, boy, come on, Silpheed; let's go round 'em up!" Jumping on her slippers, she picked up Silpheed in one arm and her pillow in another. With one arm outstretched, she raced out of the gym to look for her friends.

On the way to the girls' dorm, Sara glanced up at the night sky, which was relatively clear except for a few smudges of clouds; the perfect night for a pajama party. What few stars were out looked like tiny grains of sugar…except for one. This one was much larger than the others, and redder, and brighter, like a cherry-flavored jawbreaker. To make it even more special, it slashed through the vault of blue like scissors through wrapping paper.

Her heart jumped into her throat as soon as she noticed it. "Sweet Mother of Mirth, a shooting star! You know what this means, right, Silpheed?"

"…The end of the world?"

"No, we get to make our wishes! Hurry, before it fizzles out!" Folding her hands towards her chest, Sara squeezed her eyes shut. Under her breath, she recited the traditional rhyme that usually accompanied any wish-making on a star:

"_Star light, Star bright, _

_First Star we see tonight, _

_We wish we may, we wish we might _

_Have the wishes we wish tonight._

"I wish the boys would come home. I dunno what's going on with them, but if you can put up a neon sign that'll point them home or something, Star, that'd be awesome-nity. The kids would be really happy if they came back...and so would I. Thanks, Star!"

Silpheed's wish was much more concise: "_RAWK! _I wish I'd score!"

In the middle of their wishing, they never saw the bold red star bolt downwards, towards the tree-line in the far west. By the time it vanished, the two opened their eyes. "Gosh, it's too bad that the kids missed that star," sighed Sara. "That could've been the crowning moment to the party."

"Easy come, easy go," squawked Silpheed with a flap of his wings.

"Yeah…but maybe this means Jaden and Ziti will come back? Ooh, I can't wait 'til tomorrow!" She hugged her pillow tight at the thought of seeing those two again, as jumpy as anyone on the night before Christmas. When the two continued on their way to find their guests, there was an extra bounce in her step.

______________

"I can't believe we got _more_ detention," moaned Sara as the doors shut behind her. They'd had to stay in detention hall for an extra hour, in addition to four more days added to their sentence. Just when they thought they were halfway through it!

She held up her cramping hand in front of her face, supporting it by the wrist with her good hand. She couldn't even twitch her fingers without gritting her teeth. Now she knew how her grandma felt when she complained about her arthritis.

"'For disturbing the peace and not being in bed.' I don't get it: how could everyone completely forget about the PJ party? I thought we were pretty hard to miss yesterday."

Silpheed poked his head out of her jacket. "Need more cowbell, _RAWK!_"

"Cowbell does grab attention, doesn't it?"

As the two left the school building, a gaggle of girls huddled around in the middle of the schoolyard. Sara could recognize them to be Mindy, Jasmine and Blair, who seemed to be hanging out with the Obelisk girls quite often nowadays. Judging by the way they waved their hands around and how they giggled, they must've been joking about something.

Sara grinned. If there was a joke going around, she wanted to be part of it. Lifting a finger to her lips to silence Silpheed, she crept up to the group on her tiptoes. Her boots squeaked ever so slightly against the linoleum, like two blind mice.

"…I knew that he'd come back someday," cheered Blair. "That Jaden: always full of surprises!"

Hearing the news made Sara blow her cover immediately. _"JADEN'S BACK?!" _

All three girls gave a simultaneous squeal. When they regained their senses, they turned their heads. "Oh, it's just the 'Pickle-in-the-Sandwich' girl," gasped Jasmine with a hand over her chest.

"Don't you know it's rude to butt in on conversations that don't involve you?" said Mindy.

"You said that Jaden was back. Is he, or is that a joke?"

Blair folded her arms. "Why on Earth would we joke about that?"

Suddenly, Sara's cramp didn't hurt half as much. In fact, she felt so light with joy that she jumped in the air and clicked her heels (and gave Silpheed a bit of jolt in the process). "Did you hear that, Silpheed? Our wish brought Jaden home! _AWESOME-NITY!_" Without warning, she grabbed Blair by the hands and started to twirl her around.

"_Your _wish! Still didn't score, _RAWK!_"

"Wh-What are you talking about? J-J-Jaden got home on his own terms," protested Blair as Sara let her go bumping into the other two girls. Her eyes were spinning in all directions.

"No, really! Last night, at the PJ party--the one that you guys seemed to forget about--we saw a shooting star. And we wished for the boys to come home! Oh, speaking of which, Ziti came back, too, right?"

The three stared at her as though she had a booger hanging out of her nose. "Who's Ziti?"

Sara stopped dancing in place. "You know, Ziti? He used to go to school here? He's in the Pro League and he came over to help get you guys back home? Also, he likes to play dress-up?"

The girls exchanged strange looks between each other. "Sorry, doesn't ring a bell," Blair answered after a minute. "But even if it did, I seriously doubt that a stupid wish brought him back. Don't go taking credit where it isn't due, Mary Sue."

That made Sara hang her head. Was Blair implying that she was being selfish? Just what was selfish about wishing one's friends back?

"And who jumps up to click their heels anymore? That is _so _fifties!" exclaimed Mindy. Having had enough, the three walked away and left Sara and Silpheed behind.

"...Come on, Silph; we gotta see Jaden. He's usually off fishing with his friends when he's not dueling, right?"

_______________

Sure enough, they found the Slifer sitting on a rock at the bottom of the cliff where the Red dorm perched. He hadn't seemed to have lost any extremities from battling the aliens; in fact, he looked exactly the way he did, the last time she'd seen him. When they trotted down to get a closer look at him, however, somehow…he seemed different. He had the fishing pole in his hands and everything, but he was all alone.

Sara nestled into a spot about a foot away from him, her tongue into her cheek. "Hey, Silpheed, does Jaden look, I dunno, _different_ to you, somehow?" she whispered to her cockatoo. "I can't quite put my finger on it…"

Jaden turned his head to face them, his lips pursed into a thin line, rather than curled into an amiable smile, as she was accustomed to. Even the shape of his eyes seemed different; instead of two big, round eyes twinkling of wonder, this Jaden's eyes looked more angular and glazed with an aura of detachment. Nothing hostile or haughty; just plain aloof.

Though the way he looked at them did make her feel a little strange, Sara waved at him. "Ah, _weeelcome _back, J-meister! Where've you been for the past couple of weeks?"

He gave a nonchalant shrug. "Out of school, thanks," was his laconic reply. Even his tone was different. He sounded so…grown-upish, almost like some guru up in the mountains.

"Say, did you get a haircut? You don't look like the Jaden we remember."

"_RAWK! _Sleep with any she-aliens?" asked Silpheed.

"Oh, that's right! How did it go, Jaden? What was it like?"

"What was what like?"

"The battle with the alien robot vampire werecats, that's what. Did you win? What took you so long to get back? Did you pluck off the leader's whiskers and take them back with ya as a souvenir? And where's Ziti?"

Even with his new persona, Jaden passed them a funny look, but it wasn't the traditional Jaden brand of funny. "…We won, but we didn't fight aliens; Duel monsters, really. It's a long story, and a little complicated…"

Sara scratched the top of Silpheed's head. _Real live Duel monsters? _"What do you mean? You're saying that the school was abducted by _Duel monsters_?"

"I suppose you could say that. But you'd have to have been there to really understand."

Sara had no idea what to think about that. It sounded nuts, even for her. She decided not to ask any further about it. Instead, while one hand clutched the side of her head, she asked again, "So, then…where's Ziti?"

"They probably have some in the cafeteria." He didn't say that in the chipper and curious kind of way that he used to.

Sara drummed her fingers against the rock. "_Nooo_, I mean _Ziti! _You guys were rivals or something, weren't you?"

Jaden was quiet for a tad longer than he should have been. He scratched his chin as he glanced up at the sky. "Oh. Zane, you mean? I'm not sure…"

Sara's heart sank; not in the quick, plummeting kind of way, like a stone, but more in the slow, floating kind of way, like a loose feather, until it sat on her diaphragm. In fact, she felt a small hiccup threaten to escape to escape her throat.

"Wh-What'cha mean by—_hic!_—that?"

"Last time I saw him was when I watched him in one of the most spectacular duels I'd ever seen. Sorry." Jaden's gaze shifted back to the still waters, searching for any sign of movement from his bobber.

Silpheed peeked up at his friend. "Sara?"

"…Oh. O-Okay. Thanks; sorry for bugging ya. H-Happy fishing, Jaden. Keep smiling." She strained to get back on her feet before starting the climb back.

Without looking back at her, Jaden asked, "Something the matter?"

"Ah, no, no, no-sir-ee! Just got a teensy case of the—_hic!_—cups. Heh-heh-heh!" She flashed him a thumbs-up before she slipped around the corner. She felt a bit crummy for chuckling like that, because laughter only felt good when it was genuine. And she suddenly didn't feel quite as cheerful as before.

"…Wow. I dunno how or why, but Jaden's come back all different-like, and Ziti didn't come back at all. Guess I didn't get a lot of bang for my buck, did I?" she whispered to Silpheed.

"_RAWK! _I got no bang at all."

Neither of them spoke another word until they reached the top of the cliff. With her tongue jammed in her cheek, she wondered how this could be. Maybe Jaden looked the way he did because that was what happened to people who traveled through space, like in the cartoons? But that didn't explain why Ziti hadn't returned...

Or was it because of the way she had worded the wish? When she mulled the memory of the night before over, she couldn't find anything wrong with it, except perhaps one tidbit...

_"I wish...I would be happy, too."_

A shiver danced down her backbone, causing her to bite her bottom lip. She may not have been the most intelligent kid in school, but something in her knotted gut told her that she may be stuck in a loop. A "selfish shellfish" loop.

"Silpheed...you don't think that my shellfishness screwed up the whole wish, do you?"

The cockatoo hung his head and shut his eyes. "_RAAAWK, _this again?"

"I'm serious, Silpheed! I don't wanna be selfish, but ever since Ziti pointed it out, all the signs point to the same thing. Oh, Lord of Laughter, have I...have I been like that all my life?" She hid her face in her hand.

Silpheed groaned under his breath. If they ever, _ever _met that Ziti character again, he'd make sure to give him an ultra-wicked purple nurple.

"Ohhh...I don't think I've ever--_hic!--_been so confused..."

No, make that _two _purple nurples.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	2. Act Two

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Act Two**_

_In the middle of the wasteland, all began to darken into a smoky shade of violet. Zane's attire did little to protect him from the bitter chill, but it was nothing compared to the fire that licked his veins: the only thing that had kept him going throughout this entire duel. For Zane was melting, like wax from the candle-like flicker that he had been reduced to. _

_As he clutched his chest in a vain attempt to reign the pain, he knew that he was going to lose, one way or another. He would not be the one to stop Yubel, the creature who had taken the body of Jesse Andersen. _

_Nevertheless, as his vision began to blur, he began to laugh. _

_Jesse grinned evilly. "Laughing, are we? What could possibly be so funny?" Under Yubel's possession, the boy had lost his Southern accent, as well as his frilly uniform. "Your Dragon's outmatched. You can't beat me, no matter what you try to do!" His derisive giggle was not his own, nor was the silky hiss that followed: _

"_How does it feel, knowing that you've failed? You're not going to defeat me, or save Jesse." _

_In spite of the circumstances, Zane flashed his own pained smile. "That may be, but at least I'm going out on my own terms." He revealed the last card in his hand…_

"_I play Cybernetic Zone, and I remove Cyber End Dragon from play!" As his beast melted into oblivion, the ground beneath their feet began to tremble. That wiped the grin off of Jesse's face. _

"_You WHAT? You just destroyed the only chance you had of winning!" _

_Like the awesome final burst of energy that accompanied a fire, the pain became too much to bear, dragging Zane down to his knees. From behind him, a blaze of ethereal light burned his back as his serpent sprung forth from the sand in coils, larger and brighter and prouder than it had ever been…and perhaps, would ever be. Wings outstretched and heads held high, it overshadowed the field like the snow-capped mountains where he first met the creature, gleaming brighter than the setting sun itself. _

_He just had to smirk when he noticed Jesse step backwards. "What happened?! Why does his Dragon have 16,000 Attack Points?!" _

_He could not look up to see what his Cyber End looked like, but then, he didn't have to, to know how magnificent it looked, nor did he have to see the looks on the spectators' faces to know how breathless they all were. _

"_He did it!" gasped Jaden. _

"_Th-Thanks to the effect of Cybernetic Zone, his Cyber End comes back at his End Phase twice as strong!" exclaimed Dr. Crowler. _

"…_But it'll cost me," Zane murmured to himself, hair flopping over his face. "I still have to pay…for playing my Power Bond. Cyber End's Dragon's…original Attack Points now return to me as damage. And that's a lot more…than this old heart of mine can handle." _

_And at that moment, the pain began to dissipate, as well as whatever feeling he still had in his entire body. Feeling: the first thing to go. His flame had finally gone out; all he had left was that wispy trail of smoke that stemmed from the wick that was his heart. He could feel it evaporating with every gasp he took. _

_With a metallic wail of defeat, his Dragon blew away into oblivion, leaving the field empty and him face down in the sand. _

"_It's over, then. The duel is mine," his opponent declared. Even with his senses failing, he could sense his friends rushing to his side, propping him up into a sitting position. Opening his eyes, he could see nothing but light and color, gradually blurring and blending into darker shades. But he could still hear them. He needed to say something before he faded away. _

"…_Jaden…" _

"_Yes, Zane?" _

"_Promise…promise to be careful. The darkness in him is strong…Yubel is powerful. I gave my all and lost, but I know you can beat him, Jaden. Once more, I pass the torch…to you." If anything, this duel should have helped Jaden conquer his fear of using Polymerization. _

"_Zane, don't say that," pleaded Dr. Crowler's voice. "We'll get you home and you'll be fine, you hear?" He was on the verge of sobbing. They all were. "Y-You just need some R and R." _

"_He's right. You have to fight it, Zane. You can't throw in the towel," said Jaden. "I won't let you give up the fight! If we're ever gonna get out of his world, we'll need your help!" _

"_Zane, Jaden needs you," protested Bastion. "He needs you to show him how to defeat Yubel." _

Yubel is Jaden's ex-Duel Spirit. He doesn't need my help…

"_Jaden'll be fine." _

"_Zane, please…you can't leave Syrus," begged Jaden, his voice cracking into a sob. "He needs a big brother--" _

"…_He's already got one. You two watch out for each other, and stay out of trouble…" He shut his eyes for the last time to embrace the darkness behind them. _

_Just before the smoke disappeared, he coughed out his last words: _

"_Hey, Syrus…I'm proud of you…and I always will be." _

____________

Zane did not find a light waiting for him at the end of a tunnel, contrary to most popular descriptions on the process of death. He didn't see his life flash before his eyes. He didn't wind up in some city of gold on fluffy white clouds with songs wafting through the air, nor did he wind up in some glowing red pit with flames licking his heels with screaming ringing in his ears.

In fact, death was more like sleep: somehow he was still conscious, yet unconscious at the same time. It was like a curtain of darkness wrapped around him, neither pleasant nor hostile, and time didn't apply. His mind was--though blank--still intact, but his body was gone, abandoned somewhere far away like the old skin of a snake.

_Ssssh…ssssh…_

The first sound he heard since he left his friends. It echoed all across the empty space like ocean waves stroking the shore, as softly as a mother's breath as she lulled her child to sleep.

Gradually, color began to fade in and dominate the void, like the picture on a T.V. screen when one clicked it on. Instead of darkness, Zane found miles and miles of golden sand stretching far out in front of him; to the left, the hissing grew louder, as though the waves were creeping up to him.

How peculiar, to dream about a beach after death, or even to be dreaming, at all. But the only senses he had were his eyes and his ears, fuzzy as they were; otherwise, he was numb, like a brain-dead T.V. junkie. From somewhere far overhead, he heard what sounded like a flock of gulls chanting with the waves.

A new object appeared from over the horizon: a pair of bare feet, the kind that belonged to a surfer. Before long, he was face to face with ten grainy toes wiggling in the sand.

He could've heard incorrectly, but the last thing he heard was a voice, one distorted, yet somehow familiar: "Huh, looks a little leathery for a mermaid…w-wait a minute. That's not a mermaid!"

_Click. _Like the way a T.V. flicked off, everything caved into quiet darkness in an instant.

____________

The second time the darkness fell away, Zane found himself in the middle of a white room, a fluorescent white light glaring overhead. For someone who was supposed to be dead, the dream seemed more vivid than the last. No longer did he feel weightless; rather, he felt heavy, like he gotten his body back but someone had filled it with lead. Feeling returning to his fingertips, he gripped the crisp white sheets that spread over him.

With the gears in his mind turning again, slowly but surely, as though they were rusted around the edges, he realized that he was lying in a bed, with someone beside him, not in bed with him, but sitting at the side. This new face was just inches away from his, chocolate brown eyes blinking at him. Zane did not recognize them right away, but he could vaguely distinguish the voice that followed, like the one from the beach:

"…Zane?"

Funny, it sounded like someone he knew from long ago, when he was alive. But how could that be? Wasn't he supposed to be dead, or something along those lines?

His response came out barely above a whisper: "…Where…am I?"

A cheeky grin spilled over the visitor's face, his eyes twinkling with joy. He looked ready to pounce on Zane right then and there, but stopped himself before he did. "No, no, take it easy, Atty, give him some air," he muttered.

"…Atticus…?"

Clutching the railing alongside the bed, that cheeky grin returned to Atticus's face. "You remember me!" he cheered. "You haven't lost your mind! Right?"

Zane didn't have the energy to raise his head, only to turn it towards his friend. "What're you…doing here?"

Atticus looked clueless for a moment or two, before sheepishly scratching the back of his neck. "Oh, right. You're in the hospital, Zane. I found you on the beach and brought you here. No need to thank me; your contentedness is all the payment I need."

"But…how?"

"Why, I carried you on my surfboard, with a little help from the ladies, of course. All you need is love," he explained with a hand drifting over his chest.

Zane didn't even have the energy to shake his head. "No. How did I…end up here, back at Duel Academy?"

Atticus was now scratching his head. "Where'd you think you'd end up, in Kokomo? Where'd you vanish off to, anyway?"

Though a part of Zane didn't believe Atticus would understand, he was still a trusted confidant. "I died. In another world."

Atticus's hand moved over his mouth. "Oh my gosh, so did I, when Jay went loco on us! Were you in the same Dark World as I was? Shoot, I must've missed you. I've been missing you a lot…y'know, since the tournament last year…"

His voice drifted off as his hand floated from his mouth to Zane's hand. That was the odd thing about him--or rather, one of the odd things about him: he could get a little touchy-feely with people, no matter how long he'd gone without talking to them. He didn't do it quite enough to assume that he was coming on to them, but it still didn't seem normal.

Then again, nothing about Atticus seemed normal. Or was it that he was normal, but the rest of the world wasn't? Zane was so out of it that he could hardly think straight, and thinking straight was supposed to be one of the things he did best.

His eyelids grew heavy, until he could no longer hold them open. Darkness fell on him like a shade. But he hadn't lost total consciousness, yet; he could still hear Atticus gasping in his ear. He felt him wrap his fingers in between his own.

"Zane? _Zane?! No! _Stay away from the light! Please, Zane, I can't bear to lose you for good--"

Suddenly, he heard a door swooshing open, followed by footsteps dashing across linoleum. "Atticus, it's all right." This new voice sounded like the school nurse/ gym teacher, Miss Fontaine. "Let him sleep it off. In the meantime, you should be going to class."

"But…I can't just leave him…I've left him too many times before…"

"He's going to be fine, I promise. You can come back and see him when he's feeling better."

____________

_A graduation party…why the heck didn't I think of that? Ah, well, at least everyone looks happy. _

Sara skated around the corners of the gym, arms outstretched like the monster she portrayed. Kazoo hanging in her lips, she blew into it with every ounce of gusto she still had:

_VOOOOOO! VOOOOOO! _

Silpheed, on the other hand, was not enjoying himself quite as much. "_RAAAWK! Room's spinning record-round!" _

Taking the instrument out of her mouth, Sara shouted over the rock band playing at the front: "I can't stop, Silpheed! Sonic Duck doesn't brake too well! Unless of course, you'd like me to crash."

_VOOOOOOOO! VOOOOOOO! _

As though he were jumping off of a burning truck going a hundred-twenty miles an hour, Silpheed hopped into mid-air, flapping for his life until he reached a string of colorful streamers, upon which he hung upside-down by a foot. Sara, feeling the brush of feathers against her cheek, whirled around to see what'd happened to her cockatoo, unaware that she was speeding backwards towards a refreshment table. Again, she pulled the kazoo out of her mouth.

"Hey, Silph, where'd ya--"

_CRASSSSH! _

The sound of ceramic dishes shattering on the floor rang in her ears. It happened so quickly that she didn't realize it until she found herself on the floor, lying on top of a giant, fuzzy pink pillow. Crumbs and chunks and other sorts of foodstuffs littered the floor, and a table behind her had been upset. Various partygoers stood a safe distance away with their jaws off of their hinges. The band stopped making music.

Sara blinked. "_Whoooaaa_…wh-what just happened? Huh, whatever did, at least this giant pink pillow broke my fall." She gratefully patted it. "Thanks, giant pink pillow!"

It surprised her when the pillow let out a groan.

"What're you waiting for?" someone called. "Get off of him!"

As soon as she rolled off, several students dressed as monsters rushed to help up the pillow, which turned out to not be a pillow at all, but a boy in a Watapon costume, red-faced and eyes swirling in all directions. No one helped Sara up to her feet.

"What's your problem?" a boy in a Moke-Moke costume grouched.

"Um…what'd I do?" Sara asked, adjusting the bucket on her head.

"You just drove him into the refreshment table, you dunce!"

"But that's what Sonic Duck does; he can't stop, even if he wanted to. Besides, this is a party. You're supposed to act like a dunce," she argued, pushing herself back on her feet, only to tumble back onto the floor because the wheels on her skates slid on the slippery floor.

Another boy, dressed as some kind of jingly pixie that Sara did not recognize, rolled his eyes. "Yeah, but this is a _graduation _party, for the senior students. Act like you weren't raised by monkeys."

At his suggestion, Sara grabbed onto a table leg to hoist herself back on her feet. Immediately, she began to flap her arms and wiggle her rear end. "_Quack, quack! Quackity, quick-quack!" _

"…What're you doing?"

Sara grinned. "You said don't act like I was raised by monkeys, didn't ya?" She leaned over and pretended to peck the floor for crumbs, only to--_THUD!_--topple down face-first. "I'm a birdbrain, through and through," she chuckled.

With a boy on either side of the Watapon cosplayer, they trudged off in the opposite direction. "Hard to believe that girl's a senior," one muttered.

"She's probably only graduating because the teachers can't stand her."

"_Quack! _I'm no senior! If I were, I'd use a walker and look like an apricot with a hair bun. If you want a senior, you should see my Grandpa and all of his friends at the nursing home."

They didn't turn back to fire a snappy comeback. Sara didn't like it when people walked away without saying good-bye, especially if they were disgruntled.

"H-Hey, wait, don't go away mad. I'll clean up," she offered. Crawling on her knees, paying no mind to the stickiness on the floor, she took off her cape and used it to gather whatever she could pick up. "Silpheed, where are you? Come help me eat all of this!"

"Ah, that won't be necessary." Chancellor Sheppard jogged towards them, Miss Dorothy following him.

"But we can't just throw it all out. What about that jazz about 'waste not, want not'?"

Sheppard helped Sara to her feet. "Yes, but if it's been on the floor for longer than five seconds, we don't eat it. Don't worry, Sara, we'll take care of it."

Sara looked down at her feet. "Can I at least help pick up the table?"

Dorothy popped out from behind Sheppard. "Of course, you can, sweetie," she answered with a warm smile.

"But take off those skates, first," added Sheppard. "Do you have an extra pair of shoes in your locker?"

____________

With their combined efforts, they cleaned up the mess in a matter of ten minutes, and the party played on. The only thing that was different, this time, was Sara sitting in a front-row bleacher with her skates at her side, instead of rolling around the room. Silpheed was back on her shoulder, keeping her company.

That didn't stop him from eyeing every girl that passed them by. "_Raaaawk, _let's see action!"

"We can't. Sheppie said we couldn't skate in the gym, anymore," mumbled Sara. "We also can't swing from the streamers or climb on top of tables or fool around with the sound. The Duck has been halted."

"Ain't talking about that action, _RAWK!_"

Sara tapped the underside of her seat with her heel. Since when did parties have rules, anyway? And if this was a graduation party, wasn't that all the more reason to go quackers?

She took a sip of punch from her paper cup, swishing the fruity, fizzy drink all around her mouth. Usually, she drank ginger ale whenever she felt unhappy, but they had no such thing at the party; not that she didn't like punch, though. It left her lips and tongue all reddish when she drank it, almost like a clown's. And it was still sweet; nothing like a sugar spike to lift one out of a funk.

Before she swallowed, Sara gargled her sip in order to feel that tingly sensation in the back of her throat. From the corner of her eye, she noticed Alexis Rhodes and her two friends passing her way. Sheppard hadn't said that she couldn't strike up pleasant conversation. Silpheed certainly looked pleased to see them.

Working up a cheeky grin, Sara leaned forward and waved at the three. "Hiya, girls! Some shindig we got going on tonight, huh? Hahahaha!"

Mindy and Jasmine looked at her funny, but not in the good way. "Who says 'shindig,' anymore?"

"Someone who likes crashing into refreshment tables, I guess."

"Come on, guys, let's be civil," said Alexis, who for some reason kept stealing glances at the entrance as though expecting someone to arrive. "We're all friends, aren't we?"

"Yeah, yeah, we're all friends, guys. Speaking of which, what's the deal with using the word 'guys?' I mean, by definition, a guy is a…well, guy. And yet girls use the term to refer to their girl friends," joked Sara, standing up and trailing a finger around the rim of her cup. "But then, who's so anal that it bugs them that girls call each other 'guys?'"

"From the sound of things, I'd say you are," said Mindy.

Jasmine shook her head. "Self-belittlement is the most honest form of humor there is, I guess." Sara didn't know why, but for perhaps the first time, that reply made her cheeks burn.

The two turned back to the refreshment table closest to them, but before Alexis could follow them, Sara reached out to grab her shoulder. Rhodes looked back at her, puzzled.

"Uh, Lexi, can I ask you something?"

Silpheed was too preoccupied with the Obelisk queen's chest to throw in his two cents.

"It's okay. That joke was kind of weak, but at least there's someone who still likes to joke at all." Her eyes shifted back to the entrance for a moment.

"Nah, it's not that. Listen, you're wise with lessons and stuff, right? What's it mean to be selfish?"

Alexis didn't respond right away, perhaps because she wasn't listening. Sara gave her a shake.

"Hey! What's it mean to be selfish?"

"Ah, sorry, I must've spaced out." Though Alexis passed Sara a questioning look, she answered, "Well, selfishness is a preoccupation with the self. Most people think it's when someone considers his needs and desires more important than the needs of those around him, and he may manipulate others to meet his goals.

"That_ is_ true, but selfishness has other forms. When someone cares too much about how he looks and what he has, that's selfish. When he's busy feeling sorry for himself, that's selfish. When he distances himself from his friends and spends all his time cooped up in the Slifer dorm, that's selfish, too…"

"H-How do you know if you're being selfish?" Sara gulped.

"That's the ironic thing: most people don't notice how selfish they act until someone else points it out, and even then, they may be too selfish to listen. Why do you ask?"

Sara let go of Alexis's shoulder, her arms dangling at her sides. "No reason in particular," she mumbled. "I-Is it selfish to want to make people laugh?"

Alexis raised an eyebrow. "I don't really see anything wrong with that. But then, that depends on what someone's motives are behind it. Like if they do it just to get attention, then I guess that'd be selfish. Um, are you okay?"

Sara pulled her bucket over her face so Alexis couldn't see her face crumpling up. "Oh, I'm just peachy, thanks for asking! I was just thinking about what a friend had said; I was--_hic!_--hoping it was a lie. But d-don't let me waste all your time, be--_hic!_--cause that'd be selfish of me, wouldn't it? Go on--_hic!_--hang with the others. Give them my regards. Live _la vida loca_!"

Alexis gave her another funny look. "If I were you, I'd try drinking some water for those hiccups," she suggested before she returned to her friends, who were posing for an Obelisk boy with a camera.

Silpheed's crest feathers fell flat on his head in disappointment. "Baby, come back! _RAWK!_"

Sara jabbed her tongue into her cheek. People who made others laugh to get attention were--_hic!_--selfish, huh? Well, attention _was_ nice, but that wasn't why--_hic!_--she did what she did. She did it because the world needed laughter. It was the best kind of medicine, preventative or treating, with no side-effects except maybe a hurt side or a busted gut. It brought people closer together, patched things up between them.

Heck, laughter may have been the answer to all of the world's problems. So why _wouldn't_ people want it? How could they _like _having misery over for company? That was Ziti had said…

Ziti. That sad sack. She never got a chance to—_hic!_--see him smile or laugh, to prove him wrong. Now he was gone, under circumstances of which she knew little to nothing…

_Whoosh! _

Suddenly, all of the overhead lights blinked off, casting the gym in darkness; save for one spotlight that illuminated the stage at the front. Hassleberry was in the center, clutching a microphone and a toothy grin clutching his lips.

"Ha-ha, how're ya'll tonight? Now that our bellies are full, how's about we get on with the main event to burn it off? Tonight, we're hosting a tag team hoedown: seniors versus juniors!"

A collective buzz rang from the intrigued crowds. Even Sara and Silpheed had to look up. A hoedown was tons nicer than angsting in the corner. That was what she needed: a distraction.

"Seniors pair with seniors, juniors with juniors, and guys gotta pair with a girl! Oh, and to make things interesting, we twisted a coupla rules around. Members of a tag team take turns on the same field! So what're ya'll waiting for? Grab a partner and shuffle to the other side of the gym!"

Like mice towards an attractive piece of cheddar, several Ra and Obelisk boys crowded around Alexis, who was, after all, the most popular girl in school. Sara, on the other hand, patted Silpheed on the top of his head and climbed out of the bleacher.

Before she reached the other side, she bumped into Blair, who was frantically searching the room for a partner. "Hey, Blair! Good luck with the hoedown!" Sara cheered.

Blair stopped to shoot her a look. "Where's your guy?"

Sara pointed to Silpheed. "This feathered fella, that's who," she answered with a smile that wasn't quite as genuine as she would've liked it to be.

Blair frowned. "Uh, hello? That's a bird. You can't team up with a bird."

"Sure, I can, we've been a team for a long time. Right, Silph?"

"_RAWK! _Lonely, girl?"

Sara didn't hear that. "Plus, he's a boy; Hassleberry never said what species your partner had to be, did he? Why, I could probably duel with a Mr. Potato Head, if I wanted to."

Blair made a cuckoo sign at her. "They're not gonna let you duel with a bird, girl. Either find a real guy or consider yourself a leftover. So long as he isn't Jaden, of course. Speaking of which, where_ is_ he?" She disappeared into the semi-darkness, ignoring Silpheed's call after her.

"_RAWK! _Wait! Need a partner? Single right here, _RAWK!_"

From the corner of her eye, Sara noticed Chazz and Syrus together, yet without partners. Well, as the old adage went, the more, the merrier, right?

"Chazzola, Sy! Are you guys pairing up?"

Both boys made faces. "As if!" they said in kind of simultaneity that would perhaps suggest otherwise.

Sara grinned. "Chazz, do you want to duel with us? We've always got room in our troop for one more."

"Can't have one? Swing the other way," muttered Silpheed.

Chazz folded his arms and looked away. "Thanks, but no thanks. There's only one girl worthy of dueling alongside the Chazz," he scoffed. "And I was on my way to ask her, if you don't mind."

"How 'bout you, Sy?"

Rather than look directly at her, Syrus peeked back at the huddle of boys behind him. "Er, you know, that's really nice of you to offer, but I've already got a partner--ah, that is, I will as soon as I beat Chazz to her--get back here, Chazz!" Neither of them wished the duo good-bye as they raced neck-and-neck to poor Alexis, who really could do without the extra attention.

Sara shoved her tongue into her cheek. "How's Alexis gonna juggle twenty partners on a teeny little field? Gee, that's pretty selfless, taking up all of those guys so they wouldn't feel left out…"

"_RAWK! _Lucky bastards!"

"…Huh?" She fixed her attention on the refreshment table. Someone was piling their plate--no, _two _plates--high with all sorts of foods. He seemed rather finicky about his selections, telling by the way he picked up a piece of fruit, held it up for a second, then put it back down to repeat the action for another piece.

Curious, Sara and Silpheed sidled around kids still scrambling for a partner; no one stopped them to ask them out.

"Say, there, friend! Still need partners?"

The boy looked up from a bunch of bananas. He was wearing an extra-large pair of sunglasses and a fake, bushy mustache, and his chocolate brown bangs were slicked back out of his face. He looked so silly that Sara couldn't help but to snicker.

But Silpheed saw through the disguise almost immediately. "_RAWK! _Atticus!"

Atticus put a finger to his lips. "_Ssssh! _Please don't blow my cover. If the girls know that I'm here, I'll never get out of this gym," he begged, his voice hardly above a whisper.

Sara tilted her head. "Why? Don't you want to duel?"

"Understand, I'm as much of a party animal as the next guy, but there comes a time when one realizes that life is not completely about partying. Such as when one's best friend is in the hospital…"

Sara's hand clapped over her chest. Suddenly, she didn't feel like dueling, anymore. "Oh man, that's awful! Is he okay?"

"Yeah, he'll be all right when I bring him something to eat; nothing too heavy, just something to help get his strength back up."

It didn't take Sara any persuasion to snatch a third plate. "Mind if we pitch in? There aren't many things worse than a best friend in the hospital. I don't know what I'd do if Silpheed was in the hospital."

"_RAWK! _Score with the nurses!"

Atticus stroked his chin. "Well, I guess I could use a third plate," he said thoughtfully. "Promise you won't blow my cover until we get out of the gym?"

Sara made an L-shape over her head. "We've got no reason to."

"…You sure you're not a fan girl that won't ambush me if I drop my guard?"

"Cross my heart and hope to fart!"

Atticus made a tiny smile. With his experience, he knew that his fan girls were uncomfortable to even mention farting. "Thanks."

____________

Even though he really didn't need to, Atticus had volunteered to fetch Zane a bite to eat, and had left before he could protest. But at least he had a little time to be alone, alone with his deck in his hands. Cyber Dark Dragon's image stared at him with a scornful glint in its beady eye.

For the moment, he felt no pain, but that didn't comfort him. He felt empty, heavy on the outside but hollow within, like an empty propane tank. The only feeling worse than pain was feeling nothing at all.

His heart and mind were not in-sync; while he lacked feeling, his thoughts still hummed in his ears. _What happened back there? Was my best not enough? _These words kept cycling through his head like a scratched record.

In the background, he could hear growling, which he knew for a fact did not come from his stomach. The growls were more metallic, more bestial, as though his monsters were right behind him, cold breath prickling his neck, their hunger unsatisfied. Always unsatisfied.

A voice dispelled the noise in a snap: "Is this his room?"

"Yep!" It sounded like Atticus had returned. But who was that with him? That voice had a trill to it that sounded vaguely familiar. No, it didn't sound like Syrus; this voice sounded more feminine. But it was too immature to be Miss Fontaine or Alexis.

He wasn't left guessing for too long:

"Awesome-nity! I think we got him a nice spread."

_Swish! _

Zane didn't look over to see who was in the doorway; he already knew. He only knew one person who said "awesome-nity."

"Evenin', friend of Atty's! Dinner is served, sponsored by the Sonic--"

The girl cut herself short with a gasp.

_Crash! _

The splatter of fruit and ceramic echoed across the room.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	3. Act Three

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Act Three**_

For what felt like an eternity, no one said a word, unsure of what to say or even what to think about the whole ordeal. Sara stared wide-eyed at Zane, Zane stared at the blank wall, Atticus kept shooting bemused glances at them both, and Silpheed peeked behind him to see if the nurse was on call.

Eventually, Sara broke the silence with a shaky observation: "Wh-Whoa…you sure look a l-l-lot like Ziti…"

Atticus tilted his head to one side. "Well, er, I dunno this Ziti character you're talking about, but that guy in bed is my buddy, Zane."

At once, her eyes began to shine with tears, no matter how hard she rubbed them. "…Mother of Mirth, it _is _you!"

"…What? _RAWK!_"

Before Atticus could say anything else, Sara became a green blur across the room, not bothering to stop and pick up the lamp she upset—_thump!_--by her outstretched arm. She fell on Zane like a feathery boa around his neck, knuckles digging in his scalp while she tried to ramble something in his ear, only to garble it into a dreadful noise that sounded like laughing and sobbing at the same time, laced with a bit of hiccupping.

As if he hadn't already dealt with enough hysterics from Atticus…

Zane didn't have the energy to pull her off, only enough to reach up to grab her wrist. "As much I enjoy the smell of your armpits, can you let go of my head?" he mumbled, his eyes still fixed on the wall.

Atticus did that for her, gripping her by the shoulder. "Take it easy! You don't want to pop him like a zit, do you?"

Sara hung her head, her lobcupping a little quieter, but still making her tremble all over. "I'm…I-I-I'm sorry," she choked. "I just…y-you didn't c-c-come back…nobody knew where…I m-missed you, Ziti…w-we missed you…"

With a softened look in his eyes, Atticus fished for a tissue box on a nearby table. He was not the type to like seeing girls cry. As he handed it to Sara, he said, "Hey, it's okay, it's okay, he's--"

"_Ah!" _

Suddenly, Zane found his right eye wincing from the sharp pain radiating from his chest as he reached to grab it. But it wasn't chest pain; it felt more like someone had punctured his nipple with a pin.

As a matter of fact, Silpheed had somehow managed to climb off of Sara's shoulder without anyone's notice, hop onto the bed and do just that. Except instead of a pin, he used his beak.

Silpheed flapped his wings in triumph. "Purple nurple, sucka! _RAWK!_"

Before he could administer a second one, however, Sara had just enough good judgment to look up and pull her cackling companion off of the bed. "Silpheed, what are you doing?"

"_RAWK! _Purple nurple!" replied Silpheed, squirming this way and that in an attempt to break out of her grasp.

Atticus dropped the tissue box. "Has that bird no sympathy?" he bemoaned. "Poor Zane's in a hospital bed, for crying out loud!"

"H-He usually just does that to girls, honest! What's got your feathers in a bunch, Silph?"

The cockatoo fluffed out his feathers. "_RAAAWK! _Selfish! Selfish, selfish, selfishselfishselfish!"

Zane had had about enough at that point. With a hand still over his breast, he grumbled, "I've got an idea. How's about you both get out of my room before I call security?" With his other hand, he pointed to the exit. "Last I checked, pets weren't allowed here, anyhow."

Sara's face began to crumple up again. "W-Wait, I'm sure he didn't mean anything mean by it. And we only just got to see you again, Ziti; at least let us serve you dinner and stuff. You know, catch up and everything?" she pleaded, jumping out of her chair to pick up the fruit that lay on the floor. She came back with it all cradled in her cape and Silpheed back on her shoulder.

She dumped every piece of fruit into Zane's lap. "Even though they've been on the floor, y-you could probably still eat the bananas and oranges, 'cause they've all got _a peel. _Heh-heh-heh, get it? A peel, appeal?" Her laugh sounded weaker than it usually was: a weak laugh for a weak joke. She punctuated the joke with a rap against the side of her head, an obnoxious tic of hers:

_Ta-tap, RAP! _

Zane continued to stare her and Silpheed down, his finger still pointing to the exit. "Thanks, but I'd be much happier if you left."

Sara's neck shrunk into her shoulders, fresh tears in her eyes. "R-R-Really? Well…I guess if that's what you want…I--_hic!--_I'm sorry, Ziti. _Silpheed?_"

She was probably coaxing him into apologizing, too. But rather than say anything, Silpheed started to preen the feathers under his wing.

"Silpheed!"

"Will you just go, already?"

Tipping her bucket out of her face, Sara hustled backwards into the hall in a frenzy of feathers, the door swishing shut in front of her. Once they disappeared, Atticus frowned.

"That was kind of mean, don't you think? I mean, don't get me wrong, that purple nurple was uncalled for, but to flat-out shoo her out of the room? Especially when she seems to know you so well…"

Zane glowered at him. "What makes you figure that?"

"Well, apparently, you're this 'Ziti' character she was talking about. Kind of a weird nickname to give someone--unless they're Italian or something--but it's a nickname, nevertheless; something you'd give to someone you'd know really well."

Snorted Zane, "Not as well as you think." He meant that in the context of "I hardly know that clown at all," but Atticus, being the way he was, must've interpreted that a different way, because he put two fingers over his lips.

"_Oh_…she's your girlfriend?"

What kind of fool did he take him for? "She is _not _my girlfriend. She's not my friend. She's just someone who can't seem to find anything better to do except keep prodding me for a cheap laugh. Can we just drop it?" Picking one piece of fruit at a time off of his lap, he placed them all on the table beside him before laying his head on his pillow. He simply didn't have the appetite, neither for food nor for pointless conversation.

And fortunately, Atticus backed off. "Okay, okay, you don't want to talk right now? That's cool. Y-You've been through a lot already. For now, you just concentrate on getting better…but if you need somebody around, you know I'm here."

Zane didn't respond, mostly because Atticus was only repeating what he'd said before.

____________

Sara and Silpheed never actually left the infirmary. She had her ear pressed against the wall, straining to listen in on the boys' conversation. As soon as it had ended, she turned to Silpheed with a frown. "What was with that purple nurple, mister? He just came back from who-knows-where!"

Silpheed stopped preening his feathers to pass her an indignant look. "_RAWK! _Ain't been the same!"

"What do you mean, I haven't been the same?"

"Selfish! _RAWK!_ Day in, day out, all we talk about!"

"…You mean you did that because you were mad about Ziti calling me selfish? Oh, Silpheed…" She gently scratched the top of his head, grateful to have a friend like him on her shoulder, but muddled and plain unhappy about everything else. That was the thing about drama, provided that that was what her situation was: one problem piling on top of another, without a solution to any of them, building up pressure in her head until it was on the verge of exploding. If laughter and joking were the answer to everything, why didn't it make her feel as good as it used to?

Hearing Ziti say that they weren't friends made her eyes feel like pincushions, every little tear that welled up in them like a needle. Why would he say that?

Duh, because no one liked a selfish shellfish.

On the other hand, as shellfishy as she was, Ziti's shell seemed twice as hard. Being such a big-shot in the Pro Leagues, she would've thought that having everything the average Joe could ever want--money, friends, a driver's license--would leave him content, but it didn't. He was always looking for victory, no matter how many people he'd blow up in the process.

She pondered over all of this as she and Silpheed wandered out into the lobby, her tongue jabbed extra-deep into her cheek. Victory was a selfish motive, and yet so apparently was laughter.

…Could it be that in some way or another, _everyone _was selfish? Her stomach squeezed up at that possibility. She didn't want to look at it that way; too cynical. And when a thought so cynical occurred to her, she immediately focused on something else. She just didn't know if she could face that.

"Silpheed, what do you think's wrong with Ziti?" she asked her partner as she plopped into a couch facing the window. It was useless to look out for a nice scenic view of the land far below them, for darkness blotted out every shape and color of the outside world, the only source of light being a crescent of the moon whose distance and dimness made it almost impossible to see.

"_RAWK! _Swallowed up in his own asshole!"

"Silpheed Dicky Scinner, I did not teach you to talk so you could say mean things!" Silpheed could be quite the potty-mouth if he felt like it. No one seemed to hear that, because no one came up to kindly ask them to leave.

Silpheed fluffed out his feathers, surprised that Sara had chided him for saying something crude for the first time in all of the time they'd been together. "_Now_ you care? _RAWK!_"

Sara squinted. The moon reminded her of Ziti.

Atticus had implied that Ziti was sick. Now that she remembered, he did look older than he had from the last time she'd seen him, even though he still had every strand of blue hair stuck on his head and no wrinkles. Older, skinnier, frailer, like the moon looked. Was that an effect from fooling around in an alternate dimension? Had those Duel Monsters that Jaden had mentioned hurt him?

"Seriously, what do you think's wrong with Ziti?" she asked again, a bit quieter this time. "What happened?"

"Captured as a sex slave. Slept with all the she-monsters, _RAWK!_"

Sara's eyes widened. "You really think so?"

Silpheed bobbed up and down. "He caught a little bug, _RAWK!_"

"No way!" gasped Sara. "He caught _the cooties?_" The cooties was something she had learned about one day when she and her mother were at the doctor's office. She had noticed a lady sitting across from them who wouldn't stop scratching herself down there, and when she'd asked her mother why the lady was doing that, her mother had replied--with a flustered face--that it was because she had the cooties. The cooties was something one got when they slept with many people. Learning the term "sleeping" was a whole other experience entirely.

Being as old as she was at the present, one might think that the whole "cootie" concept had been dispelled from her mind with a little old-fashioned special education. But Sara _was_ a habitual class-skipper.

Miss Fontaine emerged from a room as the two guessed what the matter was with Ziti. She noticed the troubled look on Sara's face, she asked, "Something the matter?"

She turned her head to face the nurse, kneeling on the couch with her hands clutching it. "Miss F.!"

"_RAAAWK, helloooo, nurse!" _

Miss Fontaine held her clipboard against her breast. "Is everything all right?"

"Well, as much as we'd like to say yes," said Sara, "no, not _everything_ is all right. What's wrong with Ziti?"

Fontaine didn't answer right away, perhaps because like most, she had no clue who Ziti was. Had he been gone for so long that they had forgotten about him?

"He's in a room with Atticus."

Miss Fontaine blinked. "Zane, you mean?"

Sara nodded. "Yeah! You're a nurse, aren't you? Do you know what's wrong with him? What's he doing here? He didn't get the--_ulp!_--_cooties, _did he?"

Fontaine answered with a funny look, as though Sara had just proclaimed herself as President of the Sonic Duck Fan Club. "No, he…didn't."

Sara heaved a sigh of relief. "Phew! Did you hear that, Silpheed? It's not the cooties. So then, what _is_ wrong?"

Fontaine shook her head. "I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I can't say."

"…Why? You don't know?" Sara asked with her head cocked to the side. The problem may not have been the cooties, but just from the way Fontaine had said that sounded like bad news.

"Well, because that's confidential."

"Why?"

"Because it's personal information that is no one's business other than the patient's, the patient's family's, and the doctor's."

"Why?"

"That's just nurse protocol, and I must follow it."

"Why?"

At this point, Fontaine began to look weary. "Because I'm a nurse."

"Oh. Why?"

"Well, it's only fair to treat pain after treating everyone to a painful workout."

"Why?"

"_RAWK! _Into BDSM?" squawked Silpheed.

Fontaine had had enough. "I'm sorry, but while I appreciate an inquisitive mind, I'm afraid there's such a thing as too much inquisitiveness. This conversation is over," she dismissed before she started to turn around the desk.

"Huh? W-Wait, Miss F.!" Sara called, climbing over the couch in a rather undignified way. She dashed in front of the nurse with her arms outstretched. "You still haven't told us what's wrong with Ziti."

Fontaine, who was on her way of going behind the desk, pinched the spot between her eyes. "I just told you that I can't say, didn't I?"

"Why? You don't know?"

"No, it's because it's--ah, no! Not again!" The nurse hastily side-stepped around Sara and vanished into the hall, whatever she was planning to get from behind the desk apparently forgotten.

When the door closed behind her, Sara leaned to Silpheed and whispered, "I guess that means she doesn't know."

But as the old adage went, whenever one door closed, another was sure to open. By chance, as Miss Fontaine had left the lobby, Atticus entered it, his face clouded with a kind of anxiety that was uncharacteristic of him.

No sooner had she noticed him did she jump in front of him. "Atty, you and Ziti are best friends, aren't you?"

"Uh, yeah. Listen, I hope you don't take what he said back there too personally. Zane's beaten up pretty bad…though I don't think it'd hurt to give that bird of yours a little training." It was as though he had read her mind before the question had even passed her lips.

She swallowed hard. "H-He got beat up?"

His face went blank for a moment, but when he realized what he had said, he sheepishly scratched the back of his neck. "Oh, no, no, no! Sorry, I-I didn't mean it like that. No one beat him up--I don't think so--but he sure looks awful. Guess that's what happens when you've got a broken heart," he said softly.

The quaver in Sara's voice returned before her mind could comprehend what he'd said. "A broken heart? H-How'd he break it?"

"He wouldn't talk too much about it. If there's one thing about him that hasn't changed, it's that he still keeps things to himself. Maybe when he's got more strength back, I'll try speaking to him again." He didn't directly address that last sentence to Sara, but said it under his breath as he moved past her.

"Wh-What's he doing, now?"

"Sleeping. He didn't even touch his dinner," was all he said.

Of course, when Atticus referred to a broken heart, he had meant as in a heart condition. But he had always been more of an emotional person rather than an intellectual one, and since Sara knew little to nothing about medical conditions in the first place, in her mind, this broken heart was of the kind that her Aunt Clara had had when she was stood up at her wedding, or the kind she had when she thought she and Silpheed were the last people on Earth.

_So he's _not _constipated…?_

Sara shoved her tongue in her cheek. She may have not known what broke his heart, but a broken heart was a broken heart, and thinking about broken hearts just about broke her heart; left it like a teacup with a tiny chip in the corner. She may have been selfish, but she could not let that stand in her way of cheering him up.

Pushing her bucket out of her face, she asked, "Silpheed, are you thinking what I'm thinking?"

Silpheed had a hopeful glint in his eye. "Go back and party? _RAWK!_"

Sara didn't answer him. She was already on her way to look for the kitchen.

______________

"_Both Cyber Dragons will attack you, one after the other!" _

_On his command, his two monsters posed for battle, their metal plates of armor gleaming a waning kind of silver in the twilight. _

"_No more shields…attack him directly, with Strident Blast!" _

_His first Cyber Dragon charged a ball of blue energy in its gaping, steely jaws. The sound of its laser-like release rang in Zane's ears like a familiar tune, his violently irregular pulse as the base. A short-lived cloud of smoke engulfed Jesse-Yubel as his Life Points receded to 1900. _

If the next attack succeeds, I win, and destroy Jesse in the process, _he thought with a hand over his chest, teeth grinding in a futile attempt to dull the pain. _But it has to be done.

_As much as a part of him wished that this duel could go on for a while longer, he smirked. He roared: _

"ATTACK HIM WITH STRIDENT BLAST!"

"Zane, no! JESSE!" _Jaden cried over the din as the second Cyber Dragon's attack bathed the entire field in an electric blue light. _

Zane stirred from his reverie when he felt someone lift up his head. As he opened one eye, he couldn't see very much in all of the darkness, but he felt two hands trying to squeeze something—felt like a box—under his pillow. He heard a bird's feathers rustling above him.

He knew for a fact that this visitor wasn't the Tooth Fairy.

Zane reached up for the lamp cord, only for his fingers to tangle up in a lock of hair, instead.

"_Yow! _Wait…uh, I mean, _click!_"

He quickly pulled away his hand and sat up in bed. Finding the real lamp cord, he pulled on it.

_Cli-kik. _

The light instantly betrayed the identities of his trespassers: none other than Scinner and her cockatoo.

For a moment, the two locked in a stare: Zane's glazed and unyielding, Sara's bug-eyed and quivering, as though he'd caught her with her hand in a cookie jar, which in the sense, he had. Silpheed hid his head underneath his wing.

"Eh-heh-heh-heh-heh, hi," she tittered with a feeble wave of her fingers. "I-I know you said to go, and we did. Don't worry, we washed our hands when we finished."

_Ta-tap, RAP, _went her knuckles against her head.

"And-And-And now we gotta go, again! Sonic Sara and Silpheed have, uh, left the building!" She drew her cape over her face in that dramatic way caped people did when they made their exit before jogging backwards towards the door. She stumbled into his wheelchair on the way out, triggering Silpheed to jump off of her shoulder and flutter to the floor while she rolled all the way across the room until her back hit the wall with a _THUMP!_

"I'm okay!" she assured him. But Zane didn't say a word; if he had, she probably would've stayed longer than he preferred her to.

After five seconds of grunting and squirming around, Sara found her way out of the chair. Adjusting the bucket on her head, she flashed a peace sign. "G'night and have a pleasant tomorrow!" she cheered with a sheepish grin. Picking up Silpheed, she quickly pushed the wheelchair back into its position by his bedside and dashed outside into the yard, as abruptly as she had arrived.

_Wonder what they tried to sneak under my pillow? _As soon as they disappeared, Zane lifted up his pillow to indeed find a box underneath it. A crude paper heart cut out of looseleaf was pinned on top of it by one of her yellow barrettes with a purple face on it. On that heart were words:

"_Wat do you do wen you got a brokin hart? _

_Hav a peace of ours." _

Zane didn't look, but he guessed that there was a cake or some other form of junk food inside. He frowned, from the corniness of the present, to the fact that it was one or so in the morning, to the possibility that someone--most likely Atticus--must have blabbed about his condition. Sara would _never _leave him alone, now.

But he didn't feel like dealing with it at that moment; he just wanted to go back to bed. Shaking his head, he set the box on the floor between his bed and the lamp. Forcing himself out of bed and into the wheelchair, he took a sheet from the top, his intention not being to escape out the window (he no longer had the desire to keep searching for that perfect duel). He wheeled over to the door to tie the handles together with it. That ought to keep her out for the rest of the night.

Shuffling back into bed, he reached up for the final time to pull the cord.

_Cli-kik. _

____________

He suffered no more nuisances until the next morning, when a pounding on his door shook him out of slumber. He tried to pull the pillow over his head to drown out the thumping, and when that didn't work, he gave an indignant groan.

"Zane? Are you all right in there? Open up!" He recognized the voice to be Miss Fontaine's and heaved a sigh. She could be trusted, he supposed. Folding the sheets aside, Zane inched his way over and slid into his wheelchair. As slow as he tried to take it, he winced with every movement he made; his body ached all over.

"Don't make me use the Spartan Kick!" cried a second voice that belonged to Atticus.

_THUD! _

"_YYYYIIIOOOOWW!" _

"Atticus Rhodes, there's no need to go breaking your leg!"

"Tch, w-well, lucky we're already at the hospital, then, huh?" said Atticus with a pained chuckle.

Due to his limitations, all Zane could do was untie the knot and fold the sheet into a neat square over his lap. He then wheeled himself backwards and beckoned, "Door's open."

Miss Fontaine wasted no time throwing open the door. "Zane, why on Earth did you lock us out? What if there were an emergency and we couldn't reach you?"

Atticus squeezed in front, his weak leg hoisted up to his body while he hopped on his good one. He squinted at the corner of his room. "Oh? I spy with my eye a present." Without waiting for Zane to say that it was all right, he bounced into the room and into the spot between the bed and the lamp. Balancing on his leg, he leaned in to pick up the box with a kind of gingerliness that was as characteristic of him as the foolish grin that conquered his face, his cheeks a ticklish pink.

"Oh-ho-ho-ho, what do we got here? Hey, Zane, who gave you a piece of their heart?"

"No one," snorted Zane.

Atticus held up the box in mid-air and pointed at it. "Well, that can't be right. If no one gave you this, it wouldn't be here in your room, would it? They even sealed it with a barrette." He paused to carefully remove the heart and open the box.

"Aww, isn't that the sweetest? They baked you a cake…donut…pastry-thing. And it's heart-shaped; I _think _it's heart-shaped, a little too lumpy to tell…"

Zane rolled his eyes. "If you like it so much, take it."

"Oh, no, no, no, I couldn't do that. This is _your _present. If someone gives you a piece of their heart, it's not mine to take…unless, of course, you should offer me it."

"Fine. I offer you that cake. You have my blessing."

Atticus's blush darkened from ticklish pink to a ruddy red. "Wh-Why, Zane, this is so sudden!"

Zane pressed his hand against his forehead. Outside the duel arena, there were some times when one couldn't win, no matter what they did. Zane was never a fan of those kinds of situations.

"Thanks, friend!" cheered Atticus. "Say, how's about we share this cake when you come back from your check-up? It looks too good not to; heck, we ought to thank our mysterious baker for dropping it by." He stole a scrutinizing glance to the barrette that rested in his palm.

_Oh, yeah, that's some mystery; even more puzzling than dueling's Ancient Egyptian roots,_ thought Zane as Miss Fontaine stepped behind him to wheel him outside.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	4. Act Four

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Act Four**_

Blair's scream could be heard throughout the hallway, perhaps beyond the school building itself:

"_**VANDALS!" **_

The members of the album committee huddled around the computer to survey the damage done to their photos. The scoundrel had scribbled over most all of them, from the yellow afro and noodle-like nose hairs extending from Chancellor Sheppard's face to the crude devil horns and fangs applied to Pharaoh's.

But the worst of them all was the photo of Jaden Yuki, the one that Blair pointed to with a quivering finger. The scoundrel had colored his hair green and added yellow feet and a duck's head. It just about triggered a seizure in poor Blair, who was as far from being an epileptic as people got.

"Oh, no! These were supposed to go into the graduation album!" lamented a Ra boy named Scott.

"We can't publish these!" groaned an Obelisk girl named Sally. "But that means now we don't have an album…"

Hassleberry pounded his fist against the wall. "_Rrrr…_who's the wily coyote behind this?" he snarled.

"_AAA-ROOOOO!" _

Everyone turned to the doorway. Sara had her hand cupped around her mouth, imitating a shrill coyote's howl. When she realized she'd snagged their attention, she grinned.

"That's Coyote for _'we are!'_" she added in a sing-song voice.

"_Yip, yip, RAWK! Yip, yip!" _chanted Silpheed, bobbing up and down on Sara's shoulder.

The group fell into a cold silence. Paying no heed to the Evil Eyes they shot in her direction, she chuckled, "We wanted to make the yearbook more memorable, and what better way to do that than to make it funnier? But I gotta say: I think my favorite one is the pic that I call _Bobobo Bo-Sheppie_…_Bo!_"

Blair stood up from the chair straight and tall, in spite of being the shortest of the group, her fist clenched at her sides. "You think it's funny to destroy all of our photographic memories that we can never capture again? They were just fine, the way they were!"

Sara's face went blank. _Say what, now? _

"But you said we could—"

"I said you could decorate the borders, not touch anything else!"

"Yeah, and what'd Pharaoh ever do to you?" demanded Tommy.

"Actually, that was Silpheed's idea," Sara corrected, pointing a finger towards her companion.

"_RAWK! _Devil in disguise!"

Sally turned back to the monitor. "Now what're we going to do?"

"I know the first thing we kin do," hissed Hassleberry, cracking his knuckles as he loomed over the dunderheaded duo.

"Um…you shouldn't go cracking your knuckles," said Sara, "knuckles that crack will break your daddy's back."

But instead of listening to her advice, Hassleberry spun her around and guided her to the door, his grip on her shoulder so tight that Sara felt it losing circulation.

Only when they reached the open door did he let go, to push her out into the hall.

"And _stay _out!" he huffed, storming back into the room. The last thing she saw before the door swished shut were the venomous stares of her former group members.

For a moment, the two looked at each other, not a word exchanged in between them. What had just happened? She reached out and rapped her knuckles against the door.

"…Guys?"

"Go away!"

Sara passed an uneasy look in Silpheed's direction. "What's the matter, fellas? What's got your feathers in a bunch?"

"Don't you get it? We just gave you the axe!" Blair shot back.

She jabbed her tongue into her cheek. "What axe?"

They heard a groan from the other side. "It means you've been discharged."

Sara pressed her nose against the door. "Wait, so where's our axe?"

Silence. Nothing but tension-filled silence.

"H-H-Hey, c'mon, can't we talk about this?"

"Feh! Y'all shoulda talked about it 'fore you gone and drawn a duck over the Sarge's head! Traitors!"

"Yeah, blasphemers!"

Sara didn't know what a blasphemer was, but judging by the way Blair had said it, it sounded pretty bad. All she'd wanted to do was lighten up the yearbook. Besides, Jaden's hair had always resembled Sonic Duck's butt, in her eyes. What was wrong with joking about that?

More silence draped over the hallway. Sara tapped the ruler against her forehead like a wand just to ward it off. Getting kicked out of a group was never fun; she'd gone through more clubs than she'd gone through jobs than she'd gone through clothes, but had never stayed in a single one for very long, mostly because she'd done something that the others didn't like. And like any other time it happened, she lingered, unsure of what to do next.

Until…she fished a crumbling sugar cookie from out of her jacket, holding it up for Silpheed to see. They were going to eat it later, but those guys needed it more than they did.

"Hope this patches up any _crumby _feelings between us." The least she could do was try to make a peace offering. A grudge was like the Bird of Divinity: as long as it was around, everyone got hurt in the end. Nothing divine about that.

She was just about to knock on the door when--

"_**WAAAAH, WHO SNUCK IN PHOTOS OF MISS FONTAINE STEPPING OUT OF THE SHOWER?!" **_

Hair--and feathers--prickled on the back of both of their necks. Sara shot Silpheed a look, but never got the chance to ask about it. Hassleberry stormed outside with his teeth grinding, his eyes ablaze with a beastly kind of rage that one would only find in a Black Tyranno's.

Sara held the cookie so tightly that it was just a crack away from crumbling into a pile on the floor.

"Uh, c-c-cookie?"

"_**RRRRR, Y'ALL WANT AN AXE? I'LL GIVE YA AN AXE!" **_He made a dive for the pair, who just barely managed to evade him. Before one could say, "Run, Sara, run!", they were sprinting down the hallway, squealing for dear life like two runaway Thanksgiving turkeys.

"_**GIT BACK HERE, PERVERTS!" **_

_____________

Zane sat facing the window, staring at the view of the ocean stretching out far below him. Well, his eyes stared at the waters, but his mind stared at something else, the tiniest and saddest of smiles playing at his lips.

He could still feel sweat pasting his bangs to his forehead, even though the bitter cold numbed his fingers and toes (or was that Death creeping up on him? He was too caught up in the moment to care). He could still see the look on Jesse's/ Yubel's face as his Cyber End Dragon arose from the sand, its white-hot light piercing the atmosphere, as though it were making one final statement on the life it led alongside Zane. He could still hear its defeated roar ring in his ears like a dying echo in a canyon, his failing heartbeat underlining it…

"_At least I'm going out on my own terms!" _

"Zane?"

His little brother's voice gently shook him back to reality as he grabbed the handles to his wheelchair.

"…Syrus?"

"Hey, Zane, how…how're you feeling?"

"I'm feeling much better." That wasn't _entirely _true, but if Syrus had merely been asking about his physical state, that answer was honest enough. He didn't want to look any more dependant than he already did.

Then again, he was in a wheelchair. One couldn't get much more dependant than that.

Syrus appeared different from the last time he'd seen him. He had traded his Ra uniform for a sporty blue Obelisk coat, but that wasn't the only thing that had changed. He looked a bit taller than before, from where Zane was sitting, anyway. And somehow, his big grey eyes didn't look so childish as they used to.

As the two headed out for the beach, Zane was too lost in thought to say much of anything. On the one hand, he was happy to see his little brother becoming a mature young man. On the other, he couldn't help but feel a bit sad that he hadn't been there to see most of it happen.

Syrus did most of the talking as he decided to pull to a stop in front of the water. "A lot of things have changed since that whole incident with Yubel," he said. "What with graduation being around the corner, everyone's starting to think about the future. Alexis is going to study abroad."

A light, salty breeze teased Zane's hair. It sounded like all of his old friends had changed since he had left them. But all he could reply was, "That so?"

"Yeah. Where does the time go? It seems like just a while ago, you graduated; kind of reminds me of your duel with Jaden. So much has happened to you and him, huh?"

Zane gazed out into the sea, stretched out for hundreds of miles ahead of him like a rippling blue plain. A flock of sea gulls suspended over the billowing clouds on the horizon laughed over the swell of the tide. They continued to fly higher yet, as though they were aiming for the very roof of the sky.

His friends, his brother--whether he believed it or not--were like the gulls: they had no limit to what they could do or where they could go. Here he was on earth, stuck in a wheelchair with a bunch of flashbacks of his glory days. Where could _he_ go from there?

"What about you?"

Syrus looked away for a moment or two. "Me? Well, I…" In some ways, Zane realized, Syrus had grown, but in others, he was still the same kid who hung on to Jaden like a security blanket.

"Are you just going to keep following Jaden around? Don't you have a future of your own to think about?"

Syrus looked down at his brother with a bemused frown. "Well, I guess you've got a point, but…"

That small, despondent smile found its way back to Zane's lips. It was this feeling at the bottom of his battered heart that formed the following words to slip out as quietly as his breath, words that he never thought he'd say, nor did he elaborate on afterwards:

"You have no idea how jealous that I am of you."

____________

Between being found on the beach and up until this particular day, if one didn't count Atticus's and Scinner's hysterics, things had overall been uneventful. Zane was well on the road to recovery; the doctor had said so, as long as he did nothing strenuous for a while.

But when he and Syrus saw Miss Fontaine rush towards them as they approached the building, that all changed in an instant. She held out her phone at arm's length, and the tense look on her face betrayed the alarm before she even called out to them:

"Zane! It's the Chancellor! He needs to speak with you."

The brothers exchanged a quick, uneasy look as she pressed the speaker button and held it up to Zane. Sure enough, the strained rasp of his former master and principal coughed out, "Zane, i-is that you? This is Sheppard…"

"This is him," Zane replied, a small swell of apprehension forming somewhere within him. He didn't ask what had happened to Sheppard; he could guess it from what Sheppard told him next:

"L-Listen to me: you n-need to leave the island immediately! Someone is after you, a duelist from the Psycho dojo…but you can't face him, n-not in your current condition…"

Zane fell silent at the utterance of "Psycho." The Psycho dojo was a mysterious school of duelists who fancied themselves to be ninjas and loved to throw cards at people's heads like kunai knives. But as "psycho" as they acted, their abilities on the dueling field were nothing to scoff at; the Psycho dojo and the Cyber dojo had feuded since the two had been established, though no one remained who knew how or why.

"You're not thinking about..." Syrus started, but cut himself short, for his question was more or less rhetorical.

"Zane, are you listening to me?"

Syrus moved in front of his brother to answer for him. "This is Syrus. Leave him to me; I won't let him do anything stupid, I promise!"

Syrus, so foolish as to take the responsibility for problems that weren't his own…Zane couldn't help but smile to himself, tickled by a mild, perhaps cynical kind of amusement.

"Pl-Please be careful, both of you," was the last thing they heard before the phone clicked.

When Miss Fontaine put her phone away, Zane spoke up. "You're all getting a little carried away with this, aren't you?"

"What? Come on, big bro, don't say you're going to challenge this guy!" pleaded Syrus.

"Especially after all of the progress you've made on getting better," added Fontaine.

"I know. I don't intend to worry anyone."

Judging by the looks on both Sy and Fontaine's faces, however, Zane didn't think he had convinced either of them of such. After all, not everyone had nerves as steely as his.

____________

When the two brothers came back to his room, Syrus pushed Zane inside and flipped on the light switch. That anxious frown refused to leave his lips. He knew that Syrus meant well, but he tended to teeter on the boundary between protectiveness and flat-out smothering. To think that just two years ago, he used to be the one clinging to the nearest leg, begging for protection. He had to speak up when Syrus dropped the suggestion:

"You know, maybe I should stay here tonight?"

"That won't be necessary, Sy. I'll be just fine by myself."

Syrus didn't look any more convinced, but how could he argue with his older brother? "Are you sure? Because if you insist, I need you to promise me that you ask who it is when someone's knocking on the door, and that you won't answer if they sound suspicious, and that you'll keep the lights on." While he was at it, he made sure to fasten the windows shut and draw the shades. He was starting to sound dangerously like their mother, but Zane didn't comment on that. He did, however, pull him back when he prepared to climb on top of a chair to make sure that no one could break in through the air vent.

"I don't think ninjas are so stupid to trump around in the air vent," uttered Zane.

Syrus did a double-take for the ceiling, but nodded. "I…I guess you're right about that. Okay, Zane, you just stay here. I'll be back to check on you, all right? Do you need me to help you change?"

"No, Syrus. I can still use my arms and legs."

For a moment, Zane thought that he'd never leave. But just seconds after he had, he was ready to climb into bed when a series of _thump-thumps _came from a side of the room. His closet door was trembling, as though something—or someone—was hiding behind it.

_Thump. Thu-thump. _

Zane knew right away that it couldn't have been his mysterious adversary; ninjas knew better than to hide in obvious places like the closet, and for that matter, make a sound when they did. With this in mind, he didn't hesitate to tear open the closet and have Scinner--who had apparently been leaning on the door--tumble at his feet, land on her rear. Her cockatoo stayed huddled in the corner.

With a hand over her bottom, she turned her head to look at Zane like she had no idea where she was, her cheeks sucked in so tightly that she looked like she'd drank a whole container of lime juice. Only a moment later, she exhaled in a tiny, absentminded chuckle.

"Eh-eh-heh, would you look at that? We've come out of the closet."

_Ta-tap, RAP, _beat her knuckles on the linoleum.

For someone who was so paranoid for Zane's safety, Syrus had neglected to check the closet. It was almost funny…though in the sad way.

"What're you doing in my closet?"

"_RAWK_, gay as Dancing Fairies!" Silpheed replied, hopping out onto Sara's knee.

"Actually, w-we were hiding from the album committee. Hassleberry said he's gonna give us the axe…which turns out to mean 'hack us up into little pieces and then feed us to…Ph-Ph-Pharaoh,'" she gulped.

Sara scooted on her rear until she and Silpheed were completely facing him. She trailed her finger along one of the spokes on his wheelchair, which sat by Zane's bedside whenever he should need it. "Nice wheels," she marveled, as though she were admiring the chrome rims on a monster truck. She was just using cheap talk as an excuse to stay. "They're like thirty-two times the size of ours."

"Whatever, you're not hiding in here."

"But Ziti, he said he's got an axe! Not even the 'pology cookie could smooth things out. All we did was goof up the photos, laugh up the album, and Blair said that we could. Neh, feels like Silpheed and I are the only ones with a sense of humor anymore…"

"Well, hiding never helped anything, especially if it was in my closet." Zane pointed to the door, but Sara didn't seem to notice. She was staring at his bare feet.

"I dunno, everyone's been different since they all came back from that Neverland world place. Even Jaden's not laughing, anymore. What if…naw, couldn't be. I gotta be crazy…"

"_RAWK! _Sara?"

_Oh, brother. _He didn't try to cut her off; she was going to say what was on her mind, no matter what.

"What if the guys _didn't _come back? What if the monsters in that Neverland world place ripped off all of their faces and came to our world in disguise? That would explain everything!" For a minute, all of the color drained out of her cheeks. With Silpheed hopping onto the floor, she hoisted herself up by Zane's shirt, leaning in all-too-close to his face with only a half-inch gap between their noses keeping them apart.

She squinted. "Ziti, if you were a monster wearing Ziti's face, would you say so?"

"…You're right. You _are_ crazy." He pushed her a decent distance away by her shoulder. "This might come across as a shocker, but what happened to everyone is something called growing up; something that you ought to do more of."

"What's that supposed to mean?" the girl demanded. "It's grown up to go around hacking people into cat chow?"

"No, but neither is hiding in my closet."

That puckered look on Sara's face returned, and for a moment, no one said a word. Zane didn't feel like dragging on the subject of growing up. Why should he? Sara was only two years younger than he; if she couldn't act her age, that was her problem. He just wanted her out of his room.

He took out her barrette, having kept it in case she'd come back, holding it out for her to pluck out of his open hand. "Oh, my raspberry barrette! Thanks!" As she fixed it back in her hair, she asked him, "Say, h-how's your heart? Is our piece getting you along?"

"That's none of your business." He stepped over to the side and gestured towards the door.

"How'd you break it? Was it that brutal over in that other world?"

"Sleep with any she-monsters? _RAWK!_"

Zane had no choice but to take Sara by the shoulders and lead her to the door; it felt like pushing a giant block across the room. Even so, she wouldn't shut up: "Come on now, if you talk about it, you'll feel better. Besides, what about ol' Hassleberry?"

"Maybe if you kept to yourself, you wouldn't always be in trouble?" he grunted, finally shoving her out the door. But as he shut it behind him, Sara still lingered outside.

"_Gaaaah!_ First you say that I'm selfish, now you tell me I _ought_ to keep to myself? Which is it, man?" For a second, he felt almost sorry he ever said a word on the subject; he never wanted in on this petulant tangent Sara was on.

_Poink! _A small, needle-sharp pinch radiated from his rear. He whirled around to search the floor, and sure enough, Silpheed was still there with him, flapping his wings and fluffing out his feathers.

"_RAWK! Steely heart, steelier buns!" _

Zane wasted not a breath as he scooped up the squirming bird in both hands before opening the door to hand him back to his muddled owner. He shut the door on their faces, not caring to spare another word to those jokers, and headed for his bed, in which he took out his deck and started to thumb through it. Nothing they said reached his immediate consciousness.

Come ten forty-five, all was still again. Sara and Silpheed had grown hoarse and left circa three hours before, which was completely fine with Zane. But the tranquility was not meant to last.

A fist pounding against the door could not get him out of bed, but a pebble clinking against the window did. Suspicion swelling in his core, he threw back his sheets and ambled to the window to draw the blinds, first halfway to see if those two had come back, then all the way when he found neither feather nor hair.

Undoing the latch on the window, he tore it open and peeked out.

_Whoosh! _

Something zipped right by his temple, swift as a bullet, slicing the air like a kunai knife. Only when it landed on the table behind him, next to his duel disk, did he get to see what it was: a card. He searched the entire yard a second time, but saw only the fountain and the shrubbery, as much as the lights in his room would allow him to see.

Zane plucked the card from out of the table, looking at the back of it to find words, black and narrow and slanted.

_Tonight at midnight, we meet at the beach. _

Zane wasn't usually the type to answer to invitations, but this was no request to make a mere social call. He had been issued a challenge.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	5. Act Five

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**The following chapter contains the duel from episode 163, not yet aired in the U.S. It's not EXACTLY how it happened on the show; I watched it, then made up most of the dialogue and went with the English names of the monsters. You could say that I "dubbed" the duel; I must confess, my dubbing skills are worse than 4Kids's. Makoto's name has not been changed, however. **_

_**Act Five**_

All Missy wanted to do was get a good night's beauty sleep; how was that so wrong? She was perfectly content in her guacamole mask and hair curlers, dreaming of the morning when she'd emerge from her chrysalis as the radiant butterfly that she was…until she awoke to the sound of someone sucking on their fingers.

As much as she hated to move out of such a comfortable position, she sat up and peeled off the cucumber slice from her left eye. As soon as she found the lamp cord—_cli-kick!_—what she found sitting on her thigh had her shrieking bloody murder.

"_**AAAAAAAH--!"**_

"_**RAAAAAAAWK!" **_

Missy tossed all of her sheets off the bed, sending the cockatoo tumbling to the floor under an avalanche of bedspread.

"_I hate birds!" _She might've picked up the entire lamp and had herself a smash if a loud and unusually chipper voice hadn't cut in:

"Don't wanna hear about what kind of food you hate, no dessert 'til you clean your plate, just eat it, eat it, eat it!"

Missy looked at her vanity, where she found old Sara McSpazzatron sitting in front of the mirror, holding a jar of her guacamole cream to her mouth like an ice cream cone. Her eyes were as wide as ping-pong balls, and she seemed to be twitching here and there in a way that could only indicate an obscenely high blood sugar level.

Missy's arms flailed all over the face. "You?! What the hell are you doing in my room? And what're you doing with _my_ guacamole spread in your hand?"

Sara stopped to shoot the Insect Princess a toothy, almost eerie grin, her lips smeared with the green stuff. For a moment, she almost looked like the Joker. "My other hand got caught in the bottle," she blurted, waving her other arm to reveal two fingers jammed in an empty ginger ale bottle.

She held out the jar. "You gotta try this guacamole stuff, it's really good! Funny thing, I don't even like avocados but this paste _rocks!_"

Missy scooted to the other end of her bed on her knees before swiping the jar out of Sara's hand. "Give me that! I need this to keep from getting wrinkles and crow's feet, moron!"

"Why would anyone put this on their face when they can eat it? Besides, only scarecrows should worry about crow's feet," cackled Sara, "'cause if they didn't, they'd be out of a job!" She cocked her head and added with a snicker, "But maybe if they looked like you do right now, their crow-scaring troubles would be over!" Her bottle beat a hollow _ta-tap, RAP _against the vanity.

Teeth gritted to the point of cracking, Missy held her hands out like she was going to seize the intruder by the shoulders and shake her like a Christmas present, but let her arms drop to her sides instead. After all, stress was awful for the skin, and at the rate they were going, she would have inflamed mountain ranges dotting her cheeks and elsewhere.

She placed her hands on her hips and tossed her head. "Well, I'm still better-looking than you are, even with this mask on."

Sara didn't hear that; she tossed her head back and hooted, "And wrinkles? Just how old are you?"

"_RAWK! _Legal age?" said Silpheed, who had managed to navigate his way out of the sheets and poke his head out.

Even though Missy and Sara were roughly the same age, Missy was already one of those women that got super-touchy when asked their age. So is the curse of the life of a beauty queen. So she dodged it by demanding, "How old are _you_?"

Sara shrugged. "I dunno, old enough to be here, I guess; but I already learned everything I'll ever need to know in kindergarten, the rest are just details! _Bwahahaha!_" When someone like Sara wouldn't act their age, it was possible for them to forget how old they actually were.

"Hmph, Duel Academy must've set their standards pretty low to admit people of your mentality. Now are you going to take your filthy bird and get out of my room, or am I going to have to get authorities involved?"

Sara's heels banged against the vanity. "I would, except it's stuck in this here bottle with my pointer." She tapped the top of Missy's head with the bottle, giggling like a squirrel. "Pull it?"

"_RAWK! _Pull it, pull it!"

As long as it would get those ding-dongs out of her room, Missy conceded. With a sigh, she grabbed the container with both hands and pulled, tugged, yanked, like she was trying to harvest a bunch of carrots.

_Pop! _

"_Urrrrrp!" _

After that belch, Sara wasn't quite so jittery anymore. In fact, her eyelids began to droop. She swayed to and fro for a few seconds, then lurched forward and rested her head on Missy's shoulder, much to the Insect Princess's vexation.

"H-Hey, what's the matter with you? Besides everything?"

Silpheed wiggled out from under the pile of sheets. "Sugar crash, _RAWK!_"

"Heh-eh, you pulled my fingers…and I burped. Heh-heh—_hic!—_heh," chuckled Sara weakly.

Unable to squirm out of her position, Missy tried to lift her off of her shoulder, a task as difficult as trying to close a trunk that won't stay shut. "Okay, hon, let's give Her Majesty a little personal space, shall we?" she grunted.

Behind Missy, Sara vaguely noticed that the room, once a colossal shrine with old Ziti's face pasted in every nook and cranny, had undergone an extreme makeover. Glittery bug-shaped mirrors and knickknacks replaced the countless posters with hearts scribbled over them, though they failed to cover the faded spaces on the walls. Peeking at Missy's neck, she thought she could even see a faded space where that nifty little locket used to be; or that was just her seeing odd shapes pop in front of her eyes, but either way, the locket was gone. Why, the only Ziti-oriented object that remained was a tiny doll that lay on her nightstand that looked exactly like him, right down to the black coat…except for some peculiar reason, it had needles protruding out of every which way: from its eyes, from its head, from its chest, from its gut, from its limbs, even from its backside.

That doll reminded her of why she'd downed that whole bottle of soda in the first place. To Missy's immense relief, she slid off the vanity—off of Missy—and was soon standing on her own feet, albeit wobbly in posture. "Z-Ziti's in the hospital, you know," she slurred, almost too messed up to form the words.

The news was enough to have Missy peel off the cucumber slice off of her right eye. "_Who's _in the hospital? Zane?" She started pumping her fists in the air and bouncing around on her knees and squealing with delight: an awful strange way to react to such terrible news, even to her, thought Sara.

"_Awright! _The voo-doo doll worked!"

What about a yoo-hoo doll? Having never heard of one of those, and feeling too light in the head to bother to ask, she held her chin to keep her head up. "He's in there with a broken heart."

"Hmph! Serves him right for breaking mine."

Sara rambled, "I-It must be busted pretty bad if—_urp!_—giving him a piece of ours didn't help." When one drank a whole liter of ale, they could still be a tad gassy.

Missy wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Well, God, no one cared when I had _my _heart broken," she snapped indignantly. She wished she hadn't said that, because before she knew it, Sara was sitting next to her, hugging her around the torso.

"Aw, Missy…"

"_RAWK, _babe!" Silpheed climbed on top of the bed and into Missy's lap to join in, making sure to nestle his head underneath her right breast.

_BLAM! _Missy, red-faced and not at all glamorous, exploded like a propane tank! Both of the clowns toppled onto the floor while the disgruntled girl attempted to roll her curlers back into place. "Damn it, don't you guys know how to keep to yourselves?!" Of course, considering Missy's past in regards to her old obsession with Ziti, she probably had no right to criticize. Not that Sara remembered that.

She clapped a hand over the back of her neck and sheepishly admitted, "Not really. Funny, that's exactly what Ziti said, kind of, weeks after he said I was selfish. So now I'm wondering if he was really complimenting me or something, 'cause here, I-I thought being selfish was a bad thing, but—"

Missy rolled her eyes. "When did you ever care about what some guy said? For that matter, why _should _you? Selfishness is arguably the best trait anyone can have."

"H-Huh?"

"Hon, lots of people avoid a lot of pain—and cultivate a lot of happiness—by keeping to themselves. Why do you think celebrities don't stop to talk to commoners? How do you think they even got where they are? Besides, if you don't look out for number one, who else will? No one, I tell you, especially not some asshole guy!" There was a vicious snarl in that last word.

"Why would I look out for the number one? I thought selfish was when you looked out for yourself?"

"No, no, no!" Missy shook her head. "I'm talking about _you! You're _number one!"

"I…I am? Then what's that make Silpheed? Number two?"

Not at all fond of being a second rank, Silpheed fluffed out his feathers. "_RAWK! _Number two stinks!"

"Eh-heh-heh, number two stinks."

Missy didn't really know why she'd gotten so far into a conversation with someone in the middle of a sugar crash, who wasn't very intelligent to begin with, but decided that she would prove her point by ending it. She got off the bed to help Sara on her feet, then to pluck a squawking Silpheed by the tail feathers and drop it into Sara's arms like a piece of trash into a bin.

"Okay, you know what? If you want to know what I'm talking about, there's someone you can talk to." She wasted no time guiding the dazed comic and her pet to the door and opening the door for her.

"R-Really? Who's that?"

Just seconds before she shoved them over the threshold, she answered flatly, "Sara Scinner."

_SLAM! _

_Click._

Standing out in the quiet hallway, Sara squinted against the pitch darkness, rocking on her heels because her legs felt like string cheese. "Gosh, Silpheed, I sure hope that this Sara kid'll …oh, wait a minute…"

At least it didn't take her a trek across the island the second time around to realize that she had been duped, in the exact way Ziti had before he had disappeared. She whirled around to face the door.

"Hey, Missy, _I'm _Sara Scinner!"

The last reply the girl gave her was a dismissive, "Exactly."

____________

Around midnight, most ordinary people slept, worked, or shook their tambourines and let it all hang down. Around midnight, Zane, fully dressed and armed, who was supposed to have it safe and easy in his room, was at the edge of the sand, staring down a bare-footed man dressed in rags who stood parallel to him ten yards away. His unruly jet-black hair hung over his eyes like a ninja's mask, but his smirk conveyed his ambitions before he announced them.

"Hn, I've got to hand it to you, Truesdale; I didn't think you were going to show up. I always considered you Cyber duelists as too cowardly to answer a challenge in the dead of night. Not that I blame you; when I'm through with you, the Cyber Dojo will be no more."

With a fist raised in conviction, he proclaimed, "The Psycho Style has for far too long been in the dark, deemed as unorthodox and improper. But after tonight, that will all change. I, Makoto Inotsume, will knock you and the entire Cyber Style off of its pedestal and establish the rightful place of the Psycho Style! Believe it!"

His ensuing laugh echoed over the lapping waves, which sounded almost like the roar of anticipating crowds that would witness Zane claim one victory after another. But it was different, this time; he had no spectators—so he assumed—except for the moon that shone on them both like a giant spotlight in the center of the night sky.

Never a fan of excessive talk, he answered, "So are we going to do this, or are you going to keep blabbering about nothing?"

Makoto didn't look pleased with the interruption, but nodded. "Very well, your demise will be swift, but it'll be far from painless!" He raised his left arm to unlock his duel disk. As Zane did the same, he paused to take out his deck. He could feel the low rumble of his monsters in his hand like a tiny wave of shocks.

_He wants a fight? We'll give him a fight, _he thought as he thrust his deck into the slot in his disk. When both duelists were ready, they gave the simultaneous battle cry:

"Game on!"

Zane helped himself to the first move. It was a brief first move: drawing a new card, then summoning his Infernal Dragon in Attack Mode.

**ATK: 2000**

**DEF: 0**

With his withered green beast on his left, he ended his turn. Right when he did, he heard two voices crying from some feet behind him: one sounded like Jaden, the other his brother.

"There they are!"

"Oh, man, we're too late! They've already started!"

Zane figured that it'd only be a matter of time before Syrus found out that he'd left his room. Not that he could stop the duel when he found him; once initiated, duels needed to be seen through to the end, whether one would win or lose. He didn't look back at him or Jaden, but instead focused on his opponent, who was in the process of drawing a card, which he played straightaway:

"I summon Drillago!"

**ATK: 1600**

**DEF: 1100**

In front of Makoto appeared a creature with gleaming drills protruding from every inch of its metallic body, and a special ability: "When there are only face-up monsters on your side of the field with 1600 Attack Points or more, my Drillago can attack you directly!"

Drillago bared its drill-like hands and began to buzz like a dentist's drill, only twenty times larger, deadlier, and rather than teeth, it was about to drill into Zane's Life Points.

"Zane, it's not too late to get out of this duel! You're really in no condition to go any further!" pleaded Syrus.

Zane didn't say a word. He simply planted his feet as firmly as he could into the sand to brace himself. He would need to for the power-up Makoto applied to his monster.

"There's more; I play the Spell, Limiter Removal, from my hand, so that I can double the Attack Points of my Drillago, with its being a Machine-type. Believe it!" he said with a sneer.

**ATK: 3200**

Makoto commanded with a jab of his fist, "Go, Drillago, attack him directly!"

Drillago plunged upon Zane like a shower of steel and sparks, its assault so swift that he could hardly see it in front of him as anything more than a bluish blur. But his ears bled with the hum of four drills as they impaled his torso. Well, not really, for Drillago was merely a hologram. Nevertheless, the pain was consuming, crushing, and real. All too real.

**Zane's LP: 800**

**Makoto's LP: 4000 **

"He's already down to 800 Life Points!" exclaimed Jaden.

Choked Syrus, "Pl-Please, Zane, stop! If y-you don't quit, you're gonna…"

Zane lurched over, his teeth gritted to the point of shattering. While his knees buckled under the burden, his hand darted straight for the center of his chest. That was just the first punch, and already his heart screamed in vain for relief, thrashing against his ribcage like a prisoner trying to escape. All the deep, irregular gasping in the world couldn't placate it.

In spite of himself, he looked square up at Makoto, who wore a sadistic grin over his lips. Zane shot him a piercing look in response, finding no need for words to let him, or Syrus, know that he refused to surrender.

"What's the matter, getting too intense for you? Too bad, I'm only getting started," said Makoto, pulling out a Spell card from his hand and showing it to the others. "Behold, DNA Denial Magic! I declare one monster-type, and as long as this is out, whenever a monster of said type is sent to the Graveyard from the field or hand, it'll be removed from play.

"And guess what type I'm choosing? Dragon-type!" he laughed with a finger pointed at Zane's hand. Why did he choose the Dragon-type? Well, as Jaden put it:

"Zane needs Dragon-type monsters in his Graveyard to utilize his Cyber Dark combo. Now thanks to DNA Denial Magic, it looks like he can't."

"Not cool!" protested Syrus, as if it'd do any good.

Finally, Makoto ended his turn with a face-down. And because of Limiter Removal's effect that destroyed the equipped monster at the end of the turn it was played, Drillago shattered out of existence like broken glass. Not that it bothered old Makoto at all. As far he was concerned, he had it made.

So Zane had lost the key for his combo. Big deal; all he needed were the right cards, and surely he could work around it. As the pain subsided—temporarily—he regained his game face and drew a new card, before switching it for a card already in his hand: Cyberdark Keel.

"I summon Cyberdark Keel in Attack Mode!"

**ATK: 800**

**DEF: 800**

With no monsters on Makoto's side of the field, he could attack him directly with both his Keel and his Infernal Dragon, though not in that order. He pointed at Makoto, shouting, "Since you're defenseless, I'm attacking you directly with Infernal Dragon!" On his command, the Dragon beat its leathery wings and dove towards the enemy with its claws outstretched.

"Defenseless? Ha, ninjas are never defenseless! I activate my face-down, Call of the Haunted!" said Makoto. "I use it to bring back Drillago from the Graveyard in Attack Mode." From out of the sand, Drillago drilled its way back onto the field…only to return to oblivion by a stream of flames spewing from Infernal Dragon's gaping jaws.

_CRASSSSHH! _

**Makoto's LP: 3600**

**Zane's LP: 800**

The smoke hadn't gotten a chance to clear when Zane moved on to his second assault. "So what? Cyberdark Keel can still lash some Life Points off of you!"

And lash, it did. The lithe black serpent looped through the air like a whip before swinging its spiny tail into the Psycho duelist's side. By then, it was his turn to groan and lurch over in discomfort.

**Makoto's LP: 2800**

**Zane's LP: 800**

A triumphant smirk crowned Zane's lips, but soon dissolved into a pained sneer. That pain, it was coming back, almost twice as unrelenting as before. He glanced at his deck through clenched teeth. For a moment, he thought about this agony he was in. How could those Underground electrodes have dealt him damage when he had not worn them in months? Could it be that…?

"I…place three cards face-down. And because of its effect, Infernal Dragon is sent to the Graveyard at the end of the turn that it did battle."

"Don't tell me you've forgotten about my Spell," jeered Makoto. "Instead of going to the Graveyard, your Dragon's out of action. Believe it!"

Zane had no choice but to believe it. He stood—could barely stand—helpless and hurt as his Dragon disappeared in a pillar of gold. His hand finding its way back on his chest, he squinted at Makoto as he began his turn, for his vision was becoming blurred. Suddenly, it grew harder to breathe.

What happened to that sweet rush of energy dueling always gave him? Then again, how could he possibly think about enjoying himself when he was fighting just to stay alive?

Makoto, on the other hand, seemed to enjoy himself a great deal. His face glowed with haughty anticipation as he summoned a new monster to his side: a small, grotesque, anthropomorphic android in spiky armor and bulging goggles strapped over its throbbing, brain-like head. It's name?

"…Jinzo-Returner!"

**ATK: 600**

**DEF: 1400**

A cold bead of sweat rolled down Zane's temple.

"Jinzo-Returner has a special ability: even though you have a monster, he can sidestep it and attack _you_ directly! Cyber Energy Shot!" With a groan, the android fired a great ball of purple energy from the palms of its hands.

"No, Zane!" Syrus wailed over the hum of the attack.

His feet planted into the sand, Zane acted in the nick of time: he activated the face-down in the center, Power Wall. With a brisk swish of his hand, he tossed the top six cards into the air, allowing them to absorb the energy ball. It shattered nine inches in front of his face like a small clap of lightning.

He may have saved 600 Life Points, but his Trap could not protect him from the pain. While his cards fluttered to the ground like a cluster of dead autumn leaves, he clutched his chest tighter still.

"Because of…my Trap, Power Wall," he explained between gasps, "I negate…100 Damage Points…for every card that I…send from my deck to the Graveyard. Since I discarded…six, any damage your Jinzo…Returner dealt is negated." Zane felt himself teeter to and fro, as if the bones in his legs were disintegrating from the marrow and outward.

The sand crunched underneath Syrus's feet as he stepped forward, the wobble in his voice implying that he was on the verge of crying. "That's it! I-If you won't pull out of the duel, th-then I'll—"

"Stay back! Just…stay back…"

To his mildest surprise, Syrus stayed back. Zane still wouldn't look at him or Jaden; his eyes refused to leave the field.

Makoto grinned. "This is so easy, it's almost getting boring. No matter. Next, I play the Spell, Psychic Wave!" Immediately, he pulled out his deck from his duel disk to fish out a random card. As he discarded it, he said, "I can only play Psychic Wave if I have a Jinzo-Returner on my side of the field in Attack Mode. By sending one 'Jinzo' monster from my hand or deck to the Graveyard, I can inflict damage to you equal to that monster's Attack Points. Truesdale, you're about to lose 600 Life Points. Believe it!"

Despite his condition, Zane gave a smirk, albeit a weak one. "Sorry, but I beg to differ. Reveal face-down, Fusion Guard!" The Trap on Zane's right bolted upright at the wave of his arm.

"When my opponent activates an effect that deals damage to me, Fusion Guard negates that effect…though I have to discard one random Fusion-type monster from my deck to do this."

_Good-bye, Cyber End._

Like he said, as he made his sacrifice, Makoto watched in dismay as his Psychic Wave fizzled out into thin air. No damage was done, and the ninja could do nothing else but place a card face-down and call it a turn. "Your move," he grumbled.

Zane could've more fully enjoyed that little triumph, had his body not punished him with yet another stab of pain. Now his left eye twitched something fierce, while his right eyed his last face-down, a card that could completely turn the tides.

_All I've got left is Rebirth Judgment…once I activate this card, I can turn every monster in both of our Graveyards into Dragon-types. By doing that, I can utilize my Cyber Dark combo, and win the duel. _

_So…this is what my deck's been after all along, hasn't it? _

A tiny, pained smile played at his lips as he reached for his deck to draw a card. Activating a face-down, under normal circumstances, could be done as effortlessly as drawing. But if one was dueling with an impending heart attack—a circumstance of which Zane knew too well—simply drawing a card became a Herculean task. The instant his fingertips brushed the top of his deck—

_Zzzzt! _

A jolt of white-hot pain entered his hand and snaked up his arm. It pricked every nerve in his being and spared no organ in between, especially not his heart, which at that point, had thrashed in his ribcage so much that it was about ready to stop altogether, as though it were giving up trying to escape the torture.

"I draw—_ngh!_"

Time seemed to slow down, almost to the point of going frame-by-frame, like a storyboard. The palms of his hands clammed up. He grew light in the head.

"Now…I…"

He could take it no longer. He finally collapsed on his knees, his hair flopping over his face.

"Oh, no!" For the second time, Syrus tried to approach him, only getting so close as to have his toe next to his edge of his trailing overcoat. "Pl-Please, Zane, why won't-won't you drop out of this duel? You can't—"

"I said stay back," Zane hissed, the agony having grown so much that it numbed his body. "I refuse…to quit…I owe it…"

"Y-You owe who? What're you talking about?"

"What's the hold-up?" barked Makoto. "Are you bowing to the Psycho Style, already?"

"I…I owe my deck," Zane whispered, gathering whatever strength he still had to push himself off of the sand. "I'll fight with it 'til the end…even if I'll have to kill myself to do it. Reveal…face-down!"

His Trap bolted upright in so much as a breath of air, in about the same way Zane wheezed out its name:

"Rebirth Judgment…"

He never got the chance to say what its effect was, for the weight of his burden forced him back onto the sand. Everything that happened thereafter crossed him as little more than fuzz, like a T.V. screen with terrible reception. Bits and pieces of information reached his threadbare consciousness, such as Syrus propping him up by the shoulders. And Makoto's snarl from what felt to him like miles away:

"…We can't stop…the reputations…on the line…if he wants to give up…believe it…"

He didn't need to hear everything his enemy had said to give him his answer. Somehow, Zane managed to drain the last of his strength from his reservoir to stumble onto his feet and give a feeble shake of his head. He couldn't afford to quit; he was too close! Too tantalizingly close…too far to reach.

For the third time that night, he flopped onto the cool, grainy sand. He did not rise again. All he could do was lay there, unable to protest as Syrus loomed over him, taking his hand into his own, drawing it close to the top of his deck to surrender.

"Zane…I'm sorry…"

His hand hovered precariously close, close enough to brace one more punitive shock to his arm.

But it never made contact.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	6. Act Six

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Because I felt it was best for what I had in mind for this story, I tweaked the canon timeline, a little. In this fic, the events of episodes 163-164 **_coincide_** with the events of episodes 165-166. Also, Chazz's stage name is Ojaman ("Ojamanjoume" without the "-joume"). But I can assure you, that's all I changed. **_

_**My brother helped to write the duel of Chazz vs. Sara and Silpheed, and bring to light a couple of new Ojama cards (which you can find out about on Yu-Gi-Oh Wiki) that we thought he would use if he saw it fit. **_

_**Act Six**_

It was nothing short of a miracle that he had managed to keep his life. Before, Zane wouldn't have considered it much of a miracle; he had a fighter's spirit. But after that mediocre performance, how the hell did he manage to squeak past Death?

Had he not been so distracted by pain, he probably would've wallowed in a feeling worse than a hundred heart attacks: shame.

Come morning, he lay in his bed with Syrus at his side. He had been at his side throughout the rest of the night, unwilling to sleep until he was certain that he had pulled through. Zane could see faint, dark circles underneath his wide, grey eyes.

"What were you thinking, Syrus?" he found himself asking. The duel had not reached a conclusive ending, since Syrus never placed Zane's hand over the deck. So Syrus had to go and do what was arguably the craziest thing he had ever done: take his place in a do-over that was set in three days' time.

Not that Zane didn't appreciate that his brother hadn't thrown in the towel, after all. But surely, he could've followed it through alone?

Or was he only kidding himself?

"What was _I _thinking?" snapped Syrus, his voice sharp with worry and dread and lack of sleep. "I should be asking _you _that!" He clenched his fists on his lap so tightly that his knuckles whitened. "I already lost you once; I'm not about to lose you for good, just because you won't quit looking for some stupid fight!"

"Oh, don't worry about that. I already found it, a long time ago," Zane replied, a pensive smile finding its way on his face. A faded scene of himself and Jesse/ Yubel in the middle of that twilit wasteland played in his mind, bringing with it a bittersweet wave of reminiscence that left him hollow as soon as it receded. "Remember when I dueled Yubel in that other world?"

"Yeah?"

"I gave that duel everything I had. I reached my peak, and I couldn't have done it without my deck." From the bedside table, he took his deck and held it up to gaze at from a distance, having not even the strength to sit up. His hand quivered with the familiar unpleasant vibrations, as if sharp teeth were nibbling on his fingers. Still, it didn't hurt a sixth as bad as it did on the field.

"It has yet to reach its peak," he murmured.

Syrus glanced at the deck, his eyes widening in a kind of revelation that Zane had found long ago. "What do you mean, Zane? Are you saying that--?"

"Once someone reaches the top, the only direction to go is down. But not the deck; it wants to keep going, regardless of my limits."

Syrus didn't take that well, not that Zane expected him to. "Wait, you're telling me that you've got this heart condition, but keep dueling anyway because your _deck _wants to? That's nuts!" Springing out of his seat, he snatched the deck from Zane's hand, glaring at it like it was a cursed artifact stolen from a mummy's tomb.

"That does it! I'm taking this far away, where it can't hurt you anymore!" He dashed for the door without so much as a farewell, and Zane was powerless to stop him. He could only imagine the trouble his brother had signed up for.

He closed his eyes. _That's the deck you'll be playing with in the rematch, Sy. I hope you know what you're doing. _

____________

Sara used to enjoy the sensation of dizziness. When she was little, she would sit on the merry-go-round and beg her father to turn it as fast as he could, then kick up clumps of mulch as she did it herself when he grew tired, deaf to the indignant squeals from the other passengers who hung for dear life. When she wasn't at the playground, she'd run circles around the furniture with her arms stretched out at her sides, or just whirl around in place like a top in the yard when her mother sent her outside for knocking into things. She could almost never pass a hill—and sometimes, when there were no hills, the staircase—without feeling the itch to roll down it. No matter how many times she crashed into a bush or tripped over the hood of the family car, no matter how many bumps and scrapes that appeared on her arms and legs, she'd always wind up on the ground, her laughter echoing up and down her street.

To Sara, dizziness was the perfect high. Seeing the world wobble up and down, the colors splash and blend into each other like a giant watercolor painting, made her feel like she was flying loop-de-loops without actually leaving the ground. Nothing bugged her when she was dizzy, and coming down was almost just as pleasant, like she were a duck in the springtime making a gentle splash in a pond after spending such a long time away.

This was what real happiness was like, she thought. In fact, feeling dizzy and feeling happy were interchangeable, like when she fell to the ground after losing a duel, her brain buzzing from that last attack (it was even better when her opponent was happy for winning). Or when she met Farley, who made her entire being feel like a shindig (and whom she still loved, but had let go for his and Pete's sake). Or when she got to be flower girl for her Aunt Clara and new Uncle Bert, going out of her way to spin all the way down the aisle as she tossed petals onto people's laps.

But here she was on the floor in her room, unable to think straight, yet unhappy. Sugar highs were as nice as riding the merry-go-round, except when she came down, she felt like a duck taking a bill-dive into the pond and smashing her head on a rock. Rather than laughing, Sara scribbled on a piece of loose-leaf paper while sunlight poured in through the window, wrapping her in its warmth. Silpheed rested on her pillow, dreaming about girls and Silpheed Snacks and whatever cockatoos dreamed about.

From her dulled pencil point appeared doodles of what looked like black twisters or wisps of smoke set in random places, some long and thin, some short and stout, some taking up three lines, others lying on their side. The only words on the paper were scrawled near the bottom, a joke without a punch line:

_What's the difrince tween good-selfish and bad-selfish? _

Silpheed couldn't help her sort it out, no one else _would _help. Perhaps that was what Missy and Ziti had been talking about, having to go to Sara Scinner for an answer? Tongue jabbed deep into her cheek, she rubbed the eraser end into her scalp, out of semi-concentration and because her head itched.

Making people laugh was selfish. Yet selfish was supposed to be a _good _thing. But where was the good in caring only for one's self? She had lain on her stomach, her mind a slab of white slate. Almost five minutes had wasted away before a coherent thought appeared:

_Maybe it's like eating a lot of cake: if you're too selfish, you get a bellyache. _She thought about Ziti, who constantly looked like his belly ached…on top of his perpetual toothache that never let him smile, and more recently, his idiopathic heartache. Either he chewed on pinecones when he was teething, or that was just what people looked like when they were too selfish. Missy didn't look so great, either, and that wasn't just because she looked like Frankenstein's mother.

People like Jaden, on the other hand—before he became a stoicster—looked healthy and vibrant, so nice to be around that one could easily forget that he was probably selfish. Or if they were selfish, they were not of the "gimme-gimme" kind.

So it all boiled down to the riddle: if everyone was selfish in some way, cynical as that sounded, was there such a thing as a good kind of selfishness—the kind that Missy had mentioned—and a bad kind? And if so, which was which? And which was she?

By that point, it felt like smoke was pouring out of her ear in pencil-black wisps, as though something in her head was ready to explode. Thinking that much for that long could do that to anyone, especially if they were easing out of a sugar crash. Sara rubbed circles into her temple.

"_Gyaaah_, you know what I could use, right now?" she moaned to herself. "A walk! I can't just stay cooped up in my room, feeling all sorry when the sun's out and there's a whole new day ahead!" It would be awfully bad-selfish of her to do that...probably. Well, it would be unproductive, that much she was sure of.

She peeked at Silpheed's sleepy form. He looked too peaceful to disturb, with his fluffy crest feathers resting on his head, but she couldn't bear to leave him alone, nor be without him. She noticed her tattered backpack hanging from the bathroom door.

Sara tiptoed for it, unzipped its "beak", and found her costume inside. It would make a nice, comfortable pillow for Silpheed to sleep on, she thought, so she took the bag into her arms and tiptoed to Silpheed's side. Most birds, skittish creatures as they were, would wake up immediately if someone took them into their hands, however gentle she was. Then again, Silpheed was no ordinary bird. Having been bred as a pet and companion, he did so little as twitch his twiggy feet as Sara nestled him on top of her cape, though not without brushing his feathers with a tiny kiss.

She left the bag half-open so he could still get air, and strapped the bag over her chest like a pouch so she could keep an eye on him. Her gait became something between a baby-step and a normal step so as not to bounce him around too much as she headed for the door, one arm around the backpack, the other swinging at her side.

Though her eye was on Silpheed, she couldn't help but notice how quiet the girls' dorm was. On normal mornings, the hallways would be alive with the muffled rush of water from shower stalls and idle chit-chat punctuated with giggling. Unless, of course, morning had ended and noon was among the island; around noon, the girls would all be on campus.

Sara tried to fend off the silence by humming a tune about a robin, one of her favorites. All the while, she wrestled with the temptation to hop and bop around; even humming the tune had that effect on her.

By the time she and Silpheed had crossed the river and left the grounds, they were still alone. Where was everyone? She bit her lip; it wasn't the first time they'd been alone, but having learned from experience, she didn't want to jump to conclusions. If she found no one at school—or worse, no school at all—_then _she would panic.

On her way, Sara tilted her head back to let the sunshine wash her face. For a while, in spite of everything, she felt content. Somebody would have to be a total shellfish to miss out on such a glorious day, one that fueled her hopes that something awesome would happen.

Fortunately, Duel Academy was still standing where it should. But that didn't spare her the surprise of hearing a faint buzz emitting from its walls: the kind that came from a delighted crowd and indicated a match was underway. Curiosity, coupled with the dislike of feeling left out, lured her inside as a duck call lured a duck.

The path from the entrance to the duel arena was a long one, even longer since Sara continued to tread carefully in order to not disturb Silpheed. With every step she took, it echoed around the vacant hall. As she drew closer to the source of the commotion, however, the roar of crowds began to drown out her footsteps. It hummed in her ears as though she had wasp nests stuck in them.

Near the entrance to the arena, Sara squinted, but could not see much more than the front rows stuffed with Ra and Obelisk kids. A stocky middle-aged man standing in the threshold blocked most of her view.

She crept up behind him with an eyebrow raised and tongue in her cheek. She tapped on his broad shoulder and blurted, "Hey, mister!"

The man gave a slight jump at her touch, then whirled around to face her when he recovered. His hair was short, oil-black, and slicked back, with the exception of one strand that dangled over his tweezed eyebrows like a tiny perch that a canary could sit on. He looked like a businessman in his fancy gold suit and silver tie, sideburns, clefted chin, and big, broken nose.

"Whoa, ah, you surprised me!" he exclaimed. His narrow black eyes drifted to her backpack, as though wondering why anyone would wear a pack on their front when they were clearly for the back.

"Sorry, friend," said Sara, her hand darting to the back of her head. "Hey, what's going on?"

The man flashed a pearly white smile at her. "Are you joking? Why, we're in the middle of the debut of dueling's newest star, Ojaman!" he laughed. He had quite a hearty laugh, the kind that Sara enjoyed the most.

A debut? Ojaman? _Geez, you really _do _miss out on stuff when you sit up in your room all day. _

Sara eased over to the other side of the threshold to see for herself. Two boys were out on the field, engaged in a duel, while cameramen on cherry pickers towered over them. She recognized the one on the right to be none other than Jaden, but the one on the left…was dressed in the most ridiculous, garishly yellow Ojama costume she had ever laid eyes on. Giant feet, twiggy arms and legs, spaghetti-like eye-stalks, googly eyes, heart-dotted trunks, extra-chubby around the middle—

_Dang, that guy's got fun taste! _

His apparel alone was enough to evoke a smile from her lips. Could it be: someone in the same profession as she was, or at least aspired for?

She pointed at him. "Is that him? Is that Ojaman?" She couldn't see his face underneath the orange puckered lips.

The man grinned. "Who else would that be, Little Kuriboh?" He gestured out to the seats on his left. "Well? What're you waiting for? Take a seat!"

"Hang on, don't I gotta pay for one?"

"You go to school here, don't ya?"

"Uh-huh."

"Then it's _free!_" He emphasized the word "free" by waving his hands in front of him like a clown. Had he not immediately moved over and brushed Sara out into the open, she would've giggled. Free was definitely in her budget.

"You just enjoy yourself, sweetie. That's what dueling's all about, anyhow." the man said before disappearing back around the corner. Sara looked back over her shoulder, her cheeks tickled with the kind of warmth one felt when they'd met a nice guy, stranger though he was.

_Wonder why he's standing around in the shadows when he could be sitting out in the light? Oh, well, _she thought with a shrug. _It's all a matter of preference, I guess, like whether someone likes their bread buttered on top or on the bottom. _She couldn't find any empty seats; it was a full house. So she opted to stand along the railing at the very top. Nothing like the bird's eye view to really see everything.

By the time she had climbed the steps, Jaden had ended his turn, and the spotlight moved over to Ojaman. After he drew a card, he played a Spell called Polymerization.

"I fuse my three Ojamas from my hand to summon my Ojama King!" Ojaman sounded like he had a nasty upper respiratory infection, funny as he sounded in the most remote way; he must be very dedicated to keep playing, marveled Sara. Funnier still, his voice sounded familiar, though she could not put her finger on why.

The Ojamas Yellow, Green and Black leapt into the air and butted their thick skulls together. Out of the stars rose a white monster which was twenty times the size of the three put together: the ever-jovial Ojama King!

**ATK: 0 **

**DEF: 3000**

The crowds went mad in the instant the King reared its massive head. Even Sara had to grin; she would've screamed and shouted with the rest if Silpheed wasn't still asleep. Come to think of it, how was the cockatoo snoozing through the din?

"Next, I play Ojamandala! For 1000 Life Points, I can summon my Ojamas back from the Graveyard!"

**Ojaman's LP: 1400**

**Jaden's LP: 4000**

_Awesome-nity! Now he's got the whole family on the field! Ooh, what's this? He's going for another card—_

"You ain't seen nothing yet! I play Ojama Delta Hurricane! Let's go, guys! Blow away every card on Jaden's side of the field!"

On his command, the Ojama trio leapt into the air, their yellowed eyes aglow as they combined the power of their cabooses in a cyclone that not only blew away Jaden's Sparkman, but almost blew away the hair on everyone's head! Sara held on to the top of her head as her ears popped with the howl of the gust.

The Ojamas floated in mid-air like three not-so-attractive butterflies when Ojaman pulled another trick out of his trunks: "I play Ojamuscle! I destroy every Ojama on the field, and for every one, my Ojama King gains 1000 Attack Points!"

Sara felt a little sorry for those poor Ojamas, but that didn't stop her from, along with the rest of the audience, holding her breath as the King took a moment to flex its bulging muscles.

**ATK: 3000**

"Go, Ojama King! Belly Flop Drop!" Ojaman declared against his opponent.

Even though she had no part in the duel, Sara clutched the rail in front of her, bracing herself as she watched Ojama King reach for the ceiling, as though it were jumping off of a diving board. It rolled in mid-air once, maybe twice, before it fell like a boulder upon Jaden, who usually had a snappy comeback to a situation like so, but not this time.

_**WHAM! **_

The ground trembled under everyone's feet, or that could've just been their stomping in applause. At that moment, Silpheed's head popped out of the backpack like a plastic mole in a Whack-A-Mole game.

"_RAWK!" _

"Silpheed, you're awake! And just in time to see the duel end, too!"

Silpheed's eyes flickered to the right, then to the left. He got unusually quiet.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

The cockatoo passed his master a blank look. "_RAWK! _Feel _shitty_." Silpheed had a habit of soiling himself when he woke up, especially if it was to an extremely loud noise. Not that that was a terribly big deal; bird-keepers were accustomed to such a thing. She'd clean up when the duel was over.

Jaden was lucky not to have flattened into a pancake, but by the way he struggled back on his feet when the smoke cleared, he may well have been.

**Jaden's LP: 1000**

**Ojaman's LP: 1400**

"I end my turn with two face-downs."

From what Sara could observe so far, Ojaman had the wit of a whip, with the tastes of a clown. But where were the jokes? Where were the silly sound effects? He was supposed to be a comedian, no?

She jammed her tongue in her cheek. _Maybe he's one of those guys who play it all cool-like until the very end? Ojamas are pretty kooky all by themselves, anyhow. _

"What's this? _RAWK!_"

"The guy at the entrance said that this was Ojaman's debut duel. See that guy in the yellow?" Sara pointed at their guy, who played it nice and cool while Jaden started his turn with the Spell, O-Oversoul, to resurrect his Sparkman from the Graveyard.

**ATK: 1600**

**DEF: 1400**

Silpheed, on the other hand, was not so impressed. "Woke up for _this? RAWK!_" If it had no girls involved, he couldn't get too deep into it. Besides, he thought of Sara as the kookier one.

Jaden may have lost his childish energy, but that didn't mean he had devolved into a less formidable force than before, as he demonstrated in the following combo:

"Next, I play from my hand, Double Fusion. At the cost of 500 Life Points, I can make two Fusion-Summonings during this move!"

**Jaden's LP: 500**

**Ojaman's LP: 1400**

"First, I'm fusing my Elemental Heroes Avian and Burstinatrix from my hand to summon my Flare Wingman!"

From out of a vortex of light, his signature Hero appeared by Sparkman, its lizard-shaped arm posed and prepared to do damage.

**ATK: 2100**

**DEF: 1200**

Ah, the clutter of jokes that Flare Wingman served as a muse for. Jaden never got most of them; she wondered that if she ever ran into him again, he would get them the second time around. Either way, seeing Wingman out had her muttering, "Flame Wingman: the Renegade Angel."

"…Next, I fuse Wingman with my Sparkman, to summon my Shining Flare Wingman!" Shining Flare Wingman, over than the fact that it had two wings, no lizard-shaped arms, and glowed like it had chowed down on flashlights, was like Flame Wingman in basically every other way.

**ATK: 2500**

**DEF: 2100**

Oh, not to mention the fact that it had a special ability that powered it up even more so:

"For every Elemental Hero in my Graveyard, my Flare Wingman gains 300 Attack Points. I have four, which means Flare Wingman gains 1200 Attack Points!"

**ATK: 3700**

Wait, four? She paused to count on her fingers: Avian, Burstinatrix, Sparkman…that was only three. What was the fourth Hero? Sara was never good at keeping track of things; a lot of folk tended to forget about the Fusion monsters—i.e. Flame Wingman—lying around in a Graveyard.

Either way, Jaden gave a wave of his arm. "All right, Flare Wingman, attack his Ojama King! Sonic Shoot!"

Every hair on Sara's head stood upright, as though she were being electrocuted by the thrashing white ball of energy that Wingman fired in Ojama King's way. She clutched her backpack tighter to her, while Silpheed squawked in surprise.

Ojaman's timing was impeccable:

"I activate my face-down!"

One would've thought that this was something that stopped the attack, or turned it against Jaden, or even take possession of the monster itself; something useful. But the face-down was nothing of such.

"Ojama Trio!"

Instead of defending the one monster he had, Ojaman gave Jaden three Ojama tokens to grace his side of the field, all with the same stats.

**ATK: 0 **

**DEF: 1000**

Nice as the gesture was, it didn't stop Ojama King from dissipating into a hill of smoke, nor the resulting explosion that drowned out Ojaman's pained shriek.

_Ka-BLAAAAM! _

**Ojaman's LP: 700**

**Jaden's LP: 1000**

The crowds fell deadly silent, as if unsure what to make of such a curious tactic. Even Jaden had to furrow his brow, but bemusement wasn't enough to keep him from initiating Flare Wingman's second ability:

"Now you take damage equal to the number of Attack Points of the monster Wingman just destroyed!"

Ojaman hadn't even gotten the chance to recover when Jaden's Hero loomed over him like an ominous beacon. All it took was a simple punch to the kisser, and he lay eagle-spread on the floor. His Life Point meter draining out sounded like a fart: odorless, but much more humiliating.

**Ojaman's LP: 0 **

**Jaden's LP: 1000**

Like a sheet of bubble wrap, jeers burst from every spectator in the stands: "Oh, man, what a lame counter-move!"

"It's so lame, it's hilarious!"

"Go, Ojaman!"

The entire room became warm with the positive energy radiating from the smiles on all of their faces. Sara was almost certain that she laughed the hardest; she wobbled on her heels until her back was against the wall before she sank to the floor, her body wracked with the stuff that tickled her pink.

All poor Silpheed could do was hold on and wait her out. Fortunately, he didn't have to wait too long; eventually, her cheeks changed from pink to purple, forcing her to stop and catch her breath. Her arms hung limp at her sides, though her gut was sore, and even that didn't bother her. A spell of dizziness overwhelmed her senses once again, but this time, it was the kind that made her feel feathery and light: the kind that she had strived for since her days on the playground. The kind that she wanted to make other people to feel; if it had to be a selfish motive, she saw no reason why it'd be anything other than good-selfish.

"Oh, geez! Oh, geez, oh, geez," she panted. "D-Did you see how he pulled that pigeon out of his sleeve, Silpheed? What a gut-punching punch line!"

Silpheed rolled his eyes. "No big deal. _RAWK!_"

"No big deal? Silpheed, did you see how he knocked everybody out?" Adopting the devoted tone of an admirer, she added, "We must model ourselves from what we have witnessed today. We want to make people crack up like that, don't we?"

She looked up to see the crowds receding through the exits, still choking with residual laughter. Some flocked around her hilarious hero like ducks to an old lady throwing bread crumbs, probably for his autograph. It'd only been his debut, and Ojaman was already a star!

It was a stretch, but maybe he had a pointer or two that he'd be willing to share? Not that Sara looked to steal his material, understand, just to know how he did it.

"Look, Silph! I think he's on the move! Know what that means?"

"Gonna be groupies? _RAWK!_"

Sara didn't answer him. She was preparing to slide down the banister. If they hurried, they could catch him before he got on his boat.

_Sonic Speed!_

____________

With determination and fleetness of foot, the duo cornered Ojaman in the boys' locker room, regardless of whether they were forbidden to be in there. It was the only spot where they could get him alone. They squeezed into a locker, peeking out through the slots as the yellow yukster trudged in, his big yellow feet dragging across the linoleum. Poor fellow must've pooped himself out, because he slumped with every step he took, his loopy eye-stalks drooping over his face.

Ojaman stopped at a locker parallel from them to pull out his duffel bag. "I can't believe I did that. Well, at least I can finally get out of this stupid costume," she heard him grumble. Huh, that didn't sound right for a comedian to say. Maybe the blood thundering in her ears had made her hear wrong?

Either way, excitement got the best of her—that, and Silpheed was getting squashed up against the door and the inside smelled like sweaty feet. Just as Ojaman was in the middle of pulling off his head—

_CLANG! _

They popped out like a jack-in-the-box.

"Health to the Ojamas!" Sara wanted to say something random and respectful, and in the spur of the moment, she had come up with that. Her fellow comedian would surely understand? Judging by the way he practically jumped out of his latex skin, however, he seemed more spooked than understanding.

He spun around to face the intruders. "What the—get out of here! This is the guys' room!"

Sara put up her hands. "No, wait! We come in peace and amusement! Plus, we're, um, kinda stuck." She grabbed onto two lockers on either side of her to pull her way out, for her rear had become jammed in the threshold. For the first time in her life, Sara realized how a sardine must've felt.

Sighing, Ojaman pinched the spot over his puckered lips before he ambled over to take her by the wrists. It took little more than a tug and a grunt to free her from her tight spot, and as she found her footing, she finally caught a glimpse of the face under the lips: spiny black bangs, charcoal eyes, chalky complexion, disgruntled scowl…

It struck a cord somewhere in her memory.

"You look just like Chazz Princeton! Are you guys related?"

"I _am _Chazz," Ojaman answered flatly, the pause that preceded implying that he felt rather uncomfortable to say so.

The instant he let her go, her hands found her way over her eyes. "I'll be a duck's godmother! Just when you think you know a guy!" Technically, Sara didn't know Chazz any better than any other girl in school who wasn't Alexis Rhodes or Blair Flannigan. Still, she had to admit, Chazz was one of the last few she suspected of having the remotest interest in the funny business. Besides, it was common knowledge that Chazz and Jaden had a rivalry going on, however friendly it had become. Why would he throw a duel in which he might've finally had a chance to defeat him?

Sara grinned. Chazz must've _really_ loved to make them laugh.

She grabbed his hand and shook it as though her intention was to dislocate his arm. "You, sir, are some kind of model for duel clowns everywhere!"

Merely for the sake of saying something, Silpheed chimed, "_RAWK! _Lady-killer!"

"Aw, yeah! And a man-killer, too!"

Chazz looked as if he wanted to pull away, but didn't. He worked up a smile, though it looked like it pained him to do it. After that crackerjack performance, Sara guessed, his smiling muscles were aching.

"Thanks…I guess."

Once she let go, she looked him square in the eyes. "So, how do you do it?"

"Do what?"

"Kill people! You know, tickle their ribs and such! Is it in the costume? The way you hold yourself? Do you crack a joke a minute and make fart noises? Is it in the timing?"

Sara would've gone fifty questions a minute if someone didn't come in, then and there. "Chazz, what's the hold-up?" As soon as he turned the corner, all three pairs of eyes turned in his direction. Sara's widened as soon as she looked into his face.

"Hey! You're the guy from the entrance!" she cheered. "What brings you here?"

The man in the suit raised an eyebrow. "I should be asking you that, sweetie. I'm here because I'm Ojaman's manager."

Finding the opportunity to shirk her questions, Chazz nodded. "Uh, yeah. I…wouldn't be where I am now if it weren't for Mike, here. He's the one you should talk to."

Mike held on to the lapels of his suit and tried to look modest. "Well, now, I can't take _all _of the credit. A T.V. director can only take so much for a rising star's instant success."

Just hearing the words "T.V. director" planted stars in Sara's eyes. "We watch a lot of T.V.!" she blurted, though not really sure why, true as that statement was.

Mike smiled in that charismatic manner he had. "That's nice to know. But seriously, I don't think you should be in here—"

"Aw, don't worry, we're not fan girls. We were just looking to find out how we can be like Ojaman! We wanna be comedians, too!"

"Er, _we?_"

"Uh-huh! Me and Silpheed! We're a package deal!" Sara stopped to gently scratch the top of Silpheed's head with her index finger.

"_RAWK! _I've got the bigger package!"

"So…what, you're looking to strike up a deal?" Mike guessed.

If Sara wasn't already quivering with excitement, now she was. She jumped up and down, from one foot to another, like she was dancing on thumbtacks, while Silpheed held on to keep from flying out. "Is-Is that how we get started?! That'd be awesome-nity, Mike! Silpheed, we're on our way!"

Chazz bit his lower lip.

"Hey, now, hang on a sec!"

Sara froze, one leg hiked up in mid-air.

Mike folded his arms over his chest. "If you were looking to deal with me, I don't think we could. I've already got Ojaman; I'm not sure if I could handle two comedians."

"You mean _three_," Sara corrected, holding up her backpack to show off a queasy-looking Silpheed.

"…_Riiiiiight. _Sorry, sweetie, I just don't think it would work."

The smile ran away from her face. Didn't T.V. directors work with a bunch of stars? Or could it be that he didn't think she and Silpheed had what it took to knock them out? So maybe they wouldn't be half as funny as Ojaman, but it wouldn't help to not try.

"What if we showed you what we could do? You know, audition? Would you reconsider reconsidering?"

Mike stroked his chin thoughtfully. "Well…I don't know…we've got a schedule to maintain—"

"_Pleeeeeeaaaaase!" _Sara pleaded, clasping her hands together at arm's length. "One duel is all we ask for: one teeny-weeny duel; five, six, seven minutes, at the longest!"

Chazz rolled his eyes, expecting his manager to tell her to get lost. What they got, to her delight and his dismay, was a shrug and:

"Nah, what the heck? We're willing to humor an admirer, aren't we, Ojaman?"

Whatever color that could be found in the comic's face drained out into sweat stains underneath his arms. "Mike! You can't be serious!"

"Oh, Chazz, in your profession, where's the need for serious?"

"This get-up—is cutting off—circulation—from my legs," he hissed through gritted teeth.

"Heh, surely you can spare seven minutes for a female fan?" Mike turned his head left and right. "Speaking of whom, where'd she dash off to?"

Sara hadn't gone that far; she and Silpheed had scrambled behind the lockers when Mike had said "Nah, what the heck?" Five seconds later, a green, feathery blur zipped past the both of them, accompanied by the blare of a kazoo.

_VOOOOOOOO! _

They were a little more than simply taken by surprise.

She stopped in front of the exit to do a twirl on the heels of her skates, stretching out her cape like a duck flapping her wings dry. On one arm was a duel disk; on her shoulder was Silpheed.

"_Quick-Quack, it's time to attack! Wouldn't you agree, Jack?" _There was no Jack among them; Sara had only mentioned Jack for the sake of rhyming.

Mike threw back his head and laughed the loudest hoot Sara had ever heard; it gave her the spark that ignited her drive to get her game on! Her funny game on, that was.

"You even got a costume and everything, huh?" Mike said between chuckles.

"_RAWK! Ain't seen nothing yet!" _

"Tell 'em, Silpheed! Come on, Ojaman, catch us if you can!" With a tilt of her bucket, a toss of her scarf, and a slap from her bill as she strapped it on, she gave another twirl before vanishing around the corner. She'd completely forgotten about the white stain mangling the back of her cape where Silpheed had relieved himself.

Chazz, on the other hand, was in no hurry to meet her in the now vacant arena. Even when he hopped up into place on the field, Sara and Silpheed didn't. They skated in a broad circle around the platform.

"Well? You're going to come up here, or not?" Chazz had to keep turning his head to keep the pair in his sight as they completed a second circle around the platform, then started a third round.

"We can't stop!"

Chazz started to look a bit tipsy. "Why not?"

"I'm Sonic Sara, and this is Silpheed! We don't have brakes!" she proclaimed, accidentally-on-purposely catching her foot in the bottom step.

_WHAM! _

Silpheed leapt off of her shoulder before she tumbled to the floor in a heap of feathers. When a bird's master made a profession out of tripping up over herself, it was useful to know when to fly the coop, for birds' bones were fragile and did not recover well from fractures. Fluttering over the top of Sara's head, he landed there and tapped on her hat.

"Except that. _RAWK! _That's our _break_!"

He tapped a rimshot into her hat with his beak: _ta-tap, RAP! _

Sara peeked out of the corner of her wincing eye. Mike, who was watching the show from the sidelines, wore a smirk on the right side of his face. She and Silpheed had practiced the "No Brakes" banter as a crowd-warmer. It might've cost her some skin off of her shins, but the pain had no comparison to the joy that radiated from the director's face to hers. Warm, indeed, like a bench that had been sat on for a long time.

Somehow, she managed to get back on her feet. She waved to Mike to let him know that she was all right, and wobbled onto the platform like a wagon with a broken wheel.

"How's about you have the first move, Oja-buddy?" she offered, wiggling like a wet duck.

Chazz took a deep breath as he carried out his Draw Phase. "Like I have a choice," he mumbled.

"What was that?"

"…I said, I summon Masked Dragon in Defense Mode."

**ATK: 1400**

**DEF: 1100**

"Then I place two cards face-down, and end my turn."

Sara's face burned. What unbelievable luck, to have the chance to face off against a comedic genius! Her heart fluttered with the same sense of anticipation as Silpheed's wings as she drew a new card.

"O-Oh, yeah? Well, your Masked Dragon's gonna need a bigger mask if it doesn't want to scare the children in the audience." Perhaps that wasn't the cleverest thing she could've said; no children were present in the audience, to start with.

She looked over the card: Sonic Duck! What better monster to kick off the duel with than her signature one? On the far left corner of her hand was the Field Spell, Rising Air Current.

She glanced over at Silpheed, with whom she shared a silent moment of mutual agreement before plucking the two cards out of her hand.

"Button up your overcoat, Ojaman! Here comes the wind! Rising Air Current!"

Even though they were indoors, a powerful breeze danced between the duelists, bringing with it a flock of wispy white cockatoo tails. Ojaman's eye-stalks flapped like the arms of an inflatable tube man, while Sara and Silpheed's feathers mussed up. Mike hung onto the lapels of his fancy suit.

Sara inhaled the fresh air. "Don't you love a windy day, Silpheed? Especially since this particular wind blows 500 extra Attack Points underneath the wings of every Wind-type monster on the field…while blowing away 400 of their Defense Points."

"Like what you do when you eat beans? _RAWK!" _

_Ta-tap, RAP! _

"My wind is not that bad!" Sara replied in feigned offense, all the while peeking out of the corner of her eye to check out Mike's face. "It's not as bad as the wind from the monster we're summoning. Ojaman, say hello to our quacking compadre…_SONIC DUCK!_"

_Qui-QUACK! _

**ATK: 1700**

**DEF: 700**

"Don't forget about the Rising Air Current! Spread your wings and take it in!"

**ATK: 2200**

**DEF: 300**

Sara did a pirouette on the heels of her skates before holding on to her bucket-hat. "Say, Ojaman, do you know why Sonic Duck crossed the field?"

Chazz probably knew the answer, but said not a word. Silpheed delivered the punch-line: "To run over Masked Dragon, _RAWK!_"

_Qui-QUACK! _With a violent flap of its short wings, the billed speed demon sliced through the air like an arrow, its beak tearing through the defense's wings before it knew what hit it. In a breath, Sonic Duck blasted its way to the other side as the Dragon detonated with an agonizing screech.

Chazz recoiled, though no Life Points were lost. "You activated my Masked Dragon's effect: when it's sent to the Graveyard as a result of battle, I can summon a Dragon-type monster with 1500 Attack Points or less from my deck. I pick Armed Dragon, Level Three!"

**ATK: 1200**

**DEF: 900**

"Since it's a Wind-type monster, it reaps the benefits of the Rising Air Current."

**ATK: 1700**

**DEF: 500**

Being the super-slick bird that it was, Sonic Duck was soon back with Sara and Silpheed, unable to do anything more for the rest of the turn. So she placed three cards face-down, "to keep Ojaman guessing."

"Your move, mister!"

"Whatever." Chazz drew a card. "I sacrifice my Armed Dragon, Level Three, so that I can evolve it into Armed Dragon, Level _Five!_"

**ATK: 2400**

**DEF: 1700**

The current whistled underneath the spiny beast's leathery, vestigial wings.

**ATK: 2900**

**DEF: 1300**

"Next, I activate my face-down, Level Copy! It lets me pick a monster on the field with 'Level' in its name and summon another monster with the same name from my hand or deck. So I'm getting another Armed Dragon, Level Five."

Sara and Silpheed shared a shrug. "Well, geez, it's not like you could pick anything else."

"Thanks for the observation, Miss Obvious," mumbled Chazz with a roll of his eyes.

**ATK: 2900**

**DEF: 1300**

"Next, I activate my second face-down, Ojama Trio! Here's a little gift, from one…_comedian_...to another."

Three of Sara's monster zones instantly became occupied with three butt-twitching Ojama tokens, all in Defense Mode; she could do nothing to protest the arrangement.

**ATK: 0 **

**DEF: 1000**

Not that she wanted to. In fact, as soon as those three buggers showed up, she squealed like a fan girl: "Ah, Silpheed, look! Ojaman gave us presents! We are _sooooo _honored!" Forgetting that she was wearing skates, she jumped seven inches in the air, but was unable to get any footing when she made the landing. The result? She found herself stuck in a terrible split on the floor, wincing in discomfort. Silpheed hovered over her head as soon as she fell.

Splits were painful to perform, even if she was a girl. She was no gymnast, after all.

"I'm…okay," she squeaked.

Chazz didn't give her the chance to get up; he was already on his way of playing a Spell from his hand. "Next, I play Level Up! I pick one of my monsters on the field with 'Level' in its name and evolve it into the next stage. Armed Dragon, Level Five, transform into Armed Dragon, Level _Seven!_"

"Wh-which one do you think he's talking about, Silpheed?" Sara asked her companion. It turned out to be the Dragon on the right, which in a pillar of shimmering gold, left a larger, longer-necked version of it in its place.

**ATK: 2800**

**DEF: 1000**

As before, the gust whistled through the spines in its armor. The Dragon inhaled with a vitalized screech.

**ATK: 3300**

**DEF: 600**

For the first time in the entire duel, Chazz smirked. "My Level Seven has a special ability: by discarding a monster from my hand, it can destroy all monsters on your side of the field with equal or less Attack Points than the monster I discarded." He picked a card to slap into the slot in his duel disk that was his Graveyard. "I throw out Ojama Blue."

In spite of the position she was in, Sara crammed her tongue in her cheek. "B-But doesn't that have, like, zilch Attack Points? You can't get rid of our Sonic Duck, can you?"

"I'm not going after your bird. I'm destroying the Ojama tokens I gave you."

"What? Hey, you can't take back something you _gave _someone! That's a rule of gift-giving!"

The smirk on Chazz's face melted into a scowl. "I can, and I have."

With just as much apathy towards the rules of gift-giving, the bigger Dragon unleashed an array of disks that hummed through the air like flying saucers. In short, they quickly made mincemeat of the poor little Ojamas, and Sara and Silpheed never got the chance to fully bask in their Ojama-ness.

Then came the real damage: 900 Points cut out of the Life Point meter. The pain was enough to send her thudding on her back. On the bright side, it helped to knock her out of that awful split.

**Sara and Silpheed's LP: 3100**

**Chazz's LP: 4000**

"_RAWK! _What gives?"

"Oh, I'm sorry, did I forget to tell you that for every Ojama token that's destroyed by any circumstance, you lose 300 Life Points? Oh, well." He pointed a fat, yellow finger at his target Sonic Duck and roared, "Awright, Level Five, attack her Sonic Duck!"

No disks were released; Level Five simply fell upon poor, cackling Sonic Duck with a swipe of his claws. For such a bulky creature, he dealt the Duck his demise quite quickly.

_CRASSSSH! _

**Sara and Silpheed's LP: 2400**

**Chazz's LP: 4000**

She had just gotten on her knees when the impact forced her even further down the field. Why, it blew her clean off, as though she were nothing but a plastic bag!

_PHHHHBBBT!_

Her rear broke her fall, but her ears still popped from that explosion. She clutched the side of her head, unable to find the footing to get her back off the floor. Not that she minded very much. Her surroundings started to spin around her, as if she were trapped on the merry-go-round.

As she brushed away her scarf, which had found its way dangling over her bucket, she had but one word to describe the feeling she was under: _"Awe—some—nity!"_

_Wonder if Mike's enjoying himself? I'm so dizzy, I can hardly see in front of me!_

"_Tch_, if you think that was awesome, you might as well stay down, because Level Seven's about to blow away whatever's left of your Life Points!" A giant silhouette blocked out the spotlight, raising his head to let out a glass-shattering battle cry.

Despite herself, she had enough sense to activate her face-down. "Hold your Dragons, buddy! We've got a face-down! Um, Silph, can you remember what it is?"

Silpheed, who had been blown off the field and landed in her lap, perched on her knee and fluffed out his feathers. "_RAWK! _Sakuretsu Armor!"

"Oh. Oh, yeah. S-So now, instead of us, um, going ka-blooey, your Level Seven goes k-ka-blooey!" She felt like lying down on the floor, hardly able to hold her head up, but resisted the urge. She couldn't take a breather, not when there were still ribs to tickle. Rather, she curled up around Silpheed, and the two of them stayed down while the impending assailant exploded over Chazz's head.

_Ka-__**BLAM!**_

Not that she didn't feel a tad guilty about doing that to Ojaman; Sara just wasn't done, yet. They were only, say, three minutes into the duel.

Chazz shielded his face with his arm, waiting for the hills of smoke to disappear into the wind before grunting, "Fine. I lay three cards face down. And since my turn ends, my Level Five's ability activates. Since it destroyed a monster in battle this turn, I can evolve it into Level Seven!"

**ATK: 3300**

**DEF: 600**

At least only _one_ Level Seven Armed Dragon stared them down. Helping Silpheed back onto her shoulder, she pushed herself onto her feet, careening from side to side as they carefully ambled back into place.

"Guess it's our turn, huh? All right…let's see the feathers fly!" she chortled, drawing a new card from the top of her deck: Reload.

She jammed her tongue into her cheek, as sore as it had become. "Silph, I got an idea; follow my lead.

"We're removing the Wind-type monster from our Graveyard—rest in peace, Sonic Duck—to summon our good ol' boy, Silpheed!"

On cue, the cockatoo leapt off of her shoulder and bounced around on the floor, bowing left and right to the pretend adoring fans in the crowd. "Ladies, ladies!" he cackled to the pretend fan girls, flexing his wings in order to look bigger and stronger than he really was.

He was so caught up in the moment that it almost gave him a heart attack when he found Silpheed—the monster—towering over him like a white-clad giant.

**ATK: 1700**

**DEF: 700**

Those were his stats before the Current wrapped itself around him like an invisible toga.

**ATK: 2200**

**DEF: 300**

Sara stopped to circle around her monster and retrieve Silpheed—the cockatoo—who had fallen on his back with his talons clawing at the air. Fortunately, he didn't suffer a real heart attack, since birds usually didn't survive such ordeals.

"Poor little guy; this is what happens when you name your best friends after monsters." She could see a grin flirting with Mike's lips.

"You okay, Silpheed?"

"…_Raaawk." _He crawled up the fabric of her uniform to resume his place on her shoulder, a tad too shaken up to say much of anything else for the time being. He never did have a pleasant history with his namesake.

Chazz knocked his forehead with the base of his palm.

"Er, anyway, next we play the Spell, Reload, which makes us shuffle all the cards in our hand back into our deck, then draw the same number of cards that we put away." With only one card in her hand, Simorgh the Bird of Divinity, she could draw only one new card in return: Graceful Charity.

Whispered Sara, "Looks like we're gonna have to play this one next, huh, Silpheed?" He slowly bobbed up and down, as though nodding in approval.

She grinned. "Ha-ha, now we're playing Graceful Charity, which lets us draw three new cards and discard two. Graceful and charitable, indeed!" Soon, Harpie Ladies Two and Three and Pot of Greed were held in front of them.

_What luck: another drawing card! Bye-bye, Harpie Ladies; may your sacrifice not be in vain. _

"Hey, Silpheed, don't they say that greed is good?"

"Maybe, _RAWK!_"

"Well, in normal circumstances, I wouldn't agree. But maybe, for the sake of the show, we could play a little opportunism, here.

"Behold, our Pot of Greed! It cooks us up two new cards!"

_Harpie Lady One and Harpie's Pet Baby Dragon…okay, now we're getting somewhere! _

"But the greed doesn't stop there; we activate our second face-down, Reckless Greed! We get two _more _cards!"

_Roc from the Valley of Haze and Double Summon…awesome-nity! _

"Come on, are you planning to finish drawing sometime this afternoon?" Chazz snapped.

"No need to sweat bullets, friend; because of Reckless Greed, we can draw no more for the next two turns." Sara pulled off her bucket-hat—exposing her tousled hair—and held it against her chest. "A sobering reminder of how greed truly does ultimately destroy the source of good," she proclaimed. Underneath the feigned solemnity, however, she and Silpheed exchanged a sneaky smile. This ridiculously long turn was but build-up…for the biggest punch-line either Mike or Ojaman have ever seen.

Being only halfway through this ridiculously long turn, she clapped her bucket back over her head. "Tell me, Ojaman, do you like parties?"

Chazz didn't answer.

"Well, I hope you like a Hysteric Party, 'cause that's what we're hosting with Face-down the Third! For the price of one card from our hand, we're inviting every Harpie Lady in the Graveyard to the festivities!"

Silpheed managed to find his spirit, again. _"RAWK! Harpie Ladies, won't you come out tonight?"_

Appearing on either side of Silpheed—the monster—were Harpie Ladies Two and Three, looking as dashing and dangerous as they ever had, or will.

**ATK: 1300**

**ATK: 1300**

"Thanks to the breeze, the girls have all the more drive to par-_tay_ hard!"

**ATK: 1800**

**ATK: 1800**

The card Sara had discarded for Hysteric Party was Roc from the Valley of Haze; due to its own ability, she could shuffle it back into her deck.

"But you know, it ain't a party with all the sisters of the roost present. So that's why we're inviting Harpie Lady One, too!"

**ATK: 1300—1800**

"That's not all: Harpie Lady One's brought a present for every Wind-type monster on the field: 300 extra Attack Points!"

**HARPIE LADY ONE: 2100**

**HARPIE LADY TWO: 2100**

**HARPIE LADY THREE: 2100**

**SILPHEED: 2500**

**ARMED DRAGON, LEVEL SEVEN: 3600**

By that point, Sara was grinning so much that her face was freezing, but as she played the last two cards in her hand, she couldn't care less.

"Have you ever seen a girl come to a party without a tiny animal companion? 'Cause most girls have a tiny doggie, I've got Silpheed. But the Harpie Ladies? Well…allow us to introduce their best friend through Double Summon, which lets us make one more Normal-Summoning."

With a wave of her arm, she cheered, "Ojaman, say hello to the party animal, Harpie's Pet Baby Dragon!"

**ATK: 1200**

**DEF: 600**

The tiny red creature, with its seemingly innocent gaze, didn't appear to be quite as much of a threat as its field mates. That was before its three abilities kicked in, which Sara counted off on her fingers with every spin she made:

"_Numero uno_: While this little cutie's out on the field, you can't attack any Harpie Lady we have out.

"Number two: It's original Attack and Defense Points _double_ in trouble…and that's before the Current and Harpie Lady One come in!"

**ATK: 2400—2900—3200**

**DEF: 1200—800**

"And C: Once a turn, it lets us kick a card from your side of the field out of the festivities. Personally, I think everyone's got the right to party, but…effects are effects. _Adioso_, Armed Dragon!"

Like any other infant of any other species, the Baby Dragon opened its toothless beak and unleashed a wail so piercing, so unholy that even a mighty creature like the Armed Dragon couldn't guard itself against it. Its image shattered in a shower of glass and a terrific bang that popped everyone's ears twofold.

Chazz grinded his teeth in frustration, coupled with the realization that he now had no monsters and was therefore vulnerable to the impending onslaught from the winged brigade. Indeed, Sara and Silpheed probably could do him in right then and there.

That is, had they chosen to go on with the Battle Phase. As she had said countless times before, winning didn't really make people happy. Laughter was the goal; it prevented cancer.

"Well, Silpheed, since everyone's come out, guess that's our turn!" she cheered, slapping her knee as if she'd just pulled off the most uber-awesome turn in the history of turns. When she declared the turn over, the color on Chazz's face returned, distributing itself into shades around his cheeks and bridge of his nose, as red as his skimpy trunks.

"_Whaaaaat?! _You're not even going to attack?"

"Why would we? It might be a Hysterical Party, but we're really pacifists at heart, aren't we, Silpheed?" She fished out the old binky from her diaper days—and early school days—having kept it with her for the sake of the "Pacifists" banter, then skimmed around the border of the field until she and Silpheed reached Chazz's side. Since his jaw remained slightly unhinged, she managed to shove the binky into his mouth.

While he gagged from the taste of old rubber—and whatever things Sara used to do with that old binky—the duo sped back to their side. Her face filled with color, as well, only instead of a ruddy red, it was a ticklish pink. "Ah, geez, we got him good!" she giggled to Silpheed, the gust from the Air Current whipping strands of her hair into her face, and Silpheed's.

She peeked out of the corner of her eye. Mike had a hand over his mouth, his body trembling ever-so-slightly with what had to be snickering, no mistake about it. It elevated her spirit so high that she wouldn't be surprised if she had found herself in the middle of an Out-of-Body Experience.

By the time they resumed their spot, Chazz had spat out the pacifier, its tattered plastic clacking against the floor. "What was that all about?" he sputtered. "No, no, don't answer that. If you want to end your turn right now, fine by me. I had a counter prepared for you, anyway. And just because you skip your Battle Phase, doesn't prevent me from activating it. Reveal face-down, Lightning Vortex!"

Immediately after he picked a card from his hand to discard, the winds formed a halo over Sara and Silpheed's monsters. Blinding bolts of light shot down from the center of the halo; deafening thunder roared in her ears. Being almost as terrified of lightning as he was of cats, squawking Silpheed dove off of her shoulder and left the field, seeking shelter in the backpack that Sara had left by the entrance.

When the commotion died down—for the time being—Sara dropped her cape. She no longer saw hide nor feather of any of her monsters. Her side was as bare as a baby's freshly powdered bottom.

"Hey! You flashed us!"

Silpheed peered out of the backpack. "_RAWK! _Exhibitionist!"

Chazz rolled his eyes. "Yeah, yeah, I'm an exhibitionist; doesn't change the fact that I've wiped out all of your monsters. Also, since the card I got rid of to use Lightning Vortex was Ojamagic, Ojamagic's effect lets me take an Ojama Yellow, Green, and Black from my deck and add them to my hand.

"Now that that's out of the way, I summon Ojama Red!"

**ATK: 0 **

**DEF: 1000**

This new Ojama was not much different from its cousins: garish red skin, skinny limbs, skimpy trunks, big head and bulging eyes. What differentiated it was that it had an ability:

"When I successfully Normal-Summon Ojama Red, I can also summon up to four Ojama monsters from my hand in Attack Mode. Allow me to introduce the twerps of the hour: Ojamas Yellow, Green and Black!"

**ATK: 0 **

**ATK: 0 **

**ATK: 0 **

Seeing the little dancing goblins in a neat row slipped the fanatic goggles back over Sara's eyes. "Ohmygod, it's the whole Ojama rainbow, almost! Silpheed, are you seeing this?"

Chazz narrowed his eyes. "Enjoy it while you can, because I'm disbanding it, in a moment. I use Polymerization to fuse together Yellow, Black, and Green. Bow down to His Majesty, Ojama King!"

The three aforementioned Ojamas leapt into the air to butt heads; from out of the concussion stars, the proud and larger-than-life ruler of Ojamas emerged, its radiant grin almost blinding poor Sara when its teeth caught the spotlight.

**ATK: 0 **

**DEF: 3000**

"He may look offensive, but he's got no offensive power. However, that's all about to change when I trigger my face-down, Ojamandala. When I've got Ojamas Yellow, Green and Black in the Graveyard, I pay 1000 Life Points to bring them all back."

**Chazz's LP: 3000**

**Sara and Silpheed's LP: 2400**

She would've gladly taken a moment to bask in the Ojama energy a second time around, but Chazz had plans to end the duel once and for all. "Then I activate my third face-down, Ojamuscle! If you've watched my duel with Jaden, you should know what this does," he said as Ojama King licked its tire-thick lips.

Indeed, she did. To be on the same field as Ojaman was one thing; to be dueling against him was something better. But seeing his Ojama King scoop up all four subordinate Ojamas into his gaping mouth, swallowing them like Nerd candies seconds before he was about to squash her with his belly, was the crowning jewel of her entire day. She wanted to celebrate this moment, and being the quick thinker she was, she didn't need to ponder over it for too long.

**ATK: 4000**

The King looked almost twice as buff as he had in the duel with Jaden; why, if every muscle slapped on him could be a slice of beefcake, no one in the world would ever go hungry again! Under his feet, Chazz jabbed a finger in her direction and shouted, "Go, Ojama King, drop the—"

"_WAIT!" _

Chazz seemed to slouch a little. "What, now?"

"Hold on one sec! Silpheed, slide whistle!"

Unwilling to be out on the field when Ojama King should fall upon them, Silpheed held the slide of the whistle in its beak and made a round-trip over her head to drop it into her open palm.

She pulled down her beak and flashed the thumbs-up. "Okay, let 'im rip!"

Squeezing the reed through her lips, she kept her eyes on the King as it skyrocketed towards the ceiling, pulling the slide accordingly:

_OoooooooooOOOOO…_

She still kept her eyes on it when the shadow of the King's belly overwhelmed her; she didn't want to miss a second!

_OOOOOoooooooooo…_

It may had only been a hologram, but the burden thrust upon her was so great that it felt as though every bone in her body had turned to dust, leaving her as nothing but a pile of meat and feathers…and as soon as her rear hit the floor, gas.

_PPPPHHBBT! _

All of that time, she had her whoopee cushion strapped to the seat of her skirt, reserved for the moment of truth. The sound rang in her ears as musically—farts could be musical, if given the chance—as the sound of her Life Point meter dropping rock-bottom.

It ended as soon as it had begun. Things didn't tilt back into focus, right away; somehow she found her footing, only to lose it again after three seconds of flailing about, since it was difficult to maintain foot when one was delirious and on wheels. Quite pathetic, really.

"Pathetic" wasn't in her vocabulary, however. Sure, she wound up on her face, doubtless that she'd bitten down on her tongue, while she was at it, but it did nothing to clam up her mood. For a little while, she felt like the seven-year-old girl fresh off the merry-go-round, without mulch stuck in her shoes.

Until Chazz deactivated his duel disk. "Well, there goes six minutes of my life I'll never get back," he grumbled.

Sara thought he had said, "There goes six minutes of my life well-spent," and blew kisses towards the pretend crowds. For a minute there, if she squinted, she really could see faces in the stands.

_PPPHHHHBBT! _

"We concur! Thank you, thank you very much! You've been a fun audience! And remember: laughter prevents cancer! Ah, Silpheed, where'd you go? Take a bow, take a bow!"

Examining the arena to see if it was safe to come out, Silpheed slid out of the backpack and hopped towards his master, who tried bowing to the "crowds" from her place on the floor. Her scarf brushed against the linoleum. Despite himself, Chazz was kind enough to bumble over—it was dreadfully uncomfortable to get around in his costume, which made him chafe around the thighs—and help her to her feet.

Sara wasted no time in seizing his hand and rattling it near out of its socket. "And thank you, Oja-bud-chummy-guy, for playing with us! We-Were we funny? Were we…half as comical as you are?"

Suddenly, a heavenly noise echoed across the arena like a waterfall, enough to almost snap Sara completely out of her spell: the sound of Mike's laughter. She whirled around to face the T.V. director clapping his giant hands. Was he applauding her and Silpheed, or Ojaman?

Whoever he clapped for, what he exclaimed next drowned her soul with hope: "_Bwahahaha, _what a show! I swear, you and the bird are _nuts_! I like that: the biz needs more nuts!"

It felt as if her tongue tried to pop out of her mouth. "Wh-Wh-What kind of nuts? Peanuts? Walnuts? Coconuts? I'm a fan of donuts, myself."

"_RAWK! _Like nuts? Are you gay?"

As soon as she realized what she'd said, Sara compensated for it by trying to look modest. "Um, what can we say? We aim to please!"

"_RAWK! _Please, indeed…"

"We wanna be like Ojaman: sacrificing victory for the sake of laughter!"

Strange, Chazz's entire face crinkled, as if we were preparing to throw up. Had she busted his gut too much? "That's it. If anyone needs me, I'll be on the boat." Tugging his wrist out of Sara's grip, he rotated towards the exit and started to hop from one foot to the other. Before long, Mike was following him, though not before stopping to flash the duo a dazzling smile.

"Thanks for the show, sweetie! With attributes like yours, you're gonna make it big, someday! Heck, Ojaman might want to watch his back, heh-heh!"

He was on his way out the exit alongside Chazz, when Sara regained enough consciousness to realize something.

"H-Hey, hold up, guys!"

The star and his manager stopped—Chazz's right leg hiked up in mid-air—and turned their necks.

"…Where do we sign?"

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	7. Act Seven

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. Goodness, can you imagine the rental fees I pay to do this? One minor character in particular does not belong to me nor Mr. Takahashi, but…well, she don't belong to me, let's put it at that. _

_This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Chazzy and I agreed that though the characters go by dubbed names, and speak perfect English and all, they are all, technically, Japanese; so, the currency we're referring to is yen. **_

_**10,000,000,000 yen is precisely 100,679,590.31 dollars. **_

_**500 yen is 5.04 dollars. **_

_**Act Seven**_

"Er, beg your pardon?"

Mike must not have heard her. Placing Silpheed on her shoulder, she sailed around the gentlemen, her arms outstretched like wings. "Where do we sign?" she parroted. "You liked us, didn't you?"

Chazz shot a look at the director, who clung to the lapels of his suit as that fluorescent smile ran away from his face. "Oh. Er, well, I…sure, you were great, but, uh…"

Sara stretched out her hand. "So you got a pen, Mikey? 'Cause we don't have one. We carry a camel's pack of props, but no props for writing. Go figure. Also, do I have to sign as Sara Scinner, or as Sonic Sara? And you don't mind if Silpheed squiggles, do you? It's the only way he knows how to write his name—"

"Oh, wow, you picked yourself a stage name, already?" Mike raised an eyebrow. "For someone with so much talent, you don't know a lot about the biz, do you?"

Sara raised both eyebrows. "What's there not to know? We audition some, we make you laugh, you like our performance, and then we sign our names on a piece of paper called a contract. That's what you call it, right? A contract?" So she had gathered from watching all of that T.V. But T.V. never told the whole story, or for that matter, the true story.

Chazz had on a tense expression, as if silently implying that that was, by no means, the way by which he had found himself stuck in an Ojama costume.

Mike, on the other hand, shook his head, and handed them a sympathetic smile. "Sorry to tell you this, sweetie, but it's kind of more complicated than that. Follow me?"

As she tried to compute, she jabbed her tongue into her cheek; the right one, this time, for her left one still felt quite sore. Even so, she couldn't follow. She looked to Silpheed for an answer, but his face was just as blank as hers.

Finally, she conceded: "Sorry, Mike, we don't follow."

Mike placed an arm around her, guiding her into the hallway. "It's like this: the road to stardom is not an easy road to tread, nor is the toll cheap."

_There's a toll? Huh, kindergarten didn't teach me that. _

"But…I thought _you_ paid for everything; isn't that what managers are for?"

Hooted Mike, "You're a joke a minute, aren't you? Seriously, though, I may wear a gold suit, but I'm not made of gold. And I ain't just talking about monetary value: to be a star, you have to pay with your heart, with your strength—"

"—don't forget your soul, your values and your dignity, not always in that order," muttered Chazz. Not that anyone heard him.

Mike continued: "And about money: I've already spent all I have promoting Ojaman. So I don't think I could hope to support you. Even if I wanted to…"

"Huh?"

"Ah, like I said, I've already got Ojaman. But I don't think you'll have a problem finding someone else to sponsor you."

All of that hope in Sara being started to leak out like air from a balloon. Disappointment was a terrible buzz-kill: rather than pop the balloon, it undid the knot that kept the hope inside it so it drained out painfully slow until she drooped like an empty balloon. She wouldn't let Mike see her deflating, though. What were the odds of running into a nice old T.V. director like they had? What were the odds of bumping into another one?

Math wasn't her strongest point, but she found it safe to assume that the odds were scary slim. On top of that, if Mike had helped to mold Chazz into Ojaman, maybe he could mold her and Silpheed into true comedians? There had to be _something _they could work out.

Sparing no actual thought about it, she offered, "What if _we _paid for the expenses?"

Everyone stopped dead in their tracks. Mike's eyes widened to the size of golf balls. "Beg your pardon!"

Sara shrugged, unwilling to be bad-selfish, if anything. "Well, you said we have to pay with our hearts and our strength and all that jazz. Might as well go the whole nine yards, right, Silpheed?" To her surprise, Silpheed didn't say a word.

Mike scratched his head, the little perch-like strand of hair bobbing around as he did. "Ah…hmm…are you sure you want to do that?"

"Aw, _phhbt! _I'll bet it's as easy as lemon meringue! It's not hard to make a lot of money—"

"—if all you want to do is make a lot of money," finished Mike, who knew that saying very well, as someone in the entertainment field.

"Actually, I was gonna say it's not hard if you don't keep spending everything in your pocket on candy, but that works, too, I guess. So, how much would we need?"

"Oh, boy…well, if you really want to know," Mike counted on his fingers, "if I had to make a guess-timate…the average bill, including promotion, health insurance—you'd definitely need that—living expenses, pet deposits, would be…I'd say…ten billion yen."

The hallway fell lethally silent. Silpheed swayed to and fro, like he'd been slapped by an angry female. Chazz sounded like he was choking. Every hair on Sara's neck and down her spine prickled. Something in her frontal lobe broke, the way a calculator broke when computing a figure pushing a billion.

_T-T-Ten billion?! Mother of Mirth, we could probably go on all the rides at Pegasus World, buy everything in the souvenir shop, and still have enough to buy the whole park, then go do other stuff I can't think of, right now! Who knew that show biz was so expensive?_

…

_Eh, guess this means no more candy for a while. _

Sara made an L-shape over her forehead. "Mikey, consider it done! Not at this very moment, but the moment when we scrape up ten Bs!" At the mentioning of "ten Bs," Silpheed's eyes shimmered like two polished pebbles.

"Really? You have connections?" Mike asked with a wrinkled brow. He meant "connections" as in friends or relations who happened to be billionaires or company share-holders, as most of the student body in Duel Academy had. After all, someone from the average social class could never see ten billion yen in their whole lifetime, no matter how hard he'd try.

Sara nodded, stopping to scratch Silpheed on his head. "We'll get by with a little help from our friends." She paused to pull off her bucket. "And Ojaman's autograph, if that's possible."

So Mike handed Chazz a fat black Sharpie to scribble **"Chazz 'Ojaman' Princeton" **over the top of her bucket-hat; when he handed it back, Sara felt her heart puffing up again with hope, like fresh helium into a balloon, a sensation that left her head light and feathery. In fact, when she and Silpheed bade the gentlemen farewell, her voice grew shrill, as if she'd swallowed a bit of helium herself.

"Thanks for your blessing, Oja-buddy! Ooooh, just think: we might even all be funny buddies, someday! Wouldn't that be awesome?"

She and Silpheed sped away, her arms stretched like Sonic Duck's wings, with Mike yelling after them, "Break a leg, Sonic Sara! Don't call us, we'll call you!" All T.V. directors said that to people who auditioned for them, though more often than not, they didn't have the courtesy to call.

Chazz shot him a withering look. "Why didn't you just say no?"

A sly grin creased over the businessman's lips. "Oh, Princeton, I couldn't bring myself to refuse such a hopeful face…directly. Besides, it wasn't necessary. If she's really got her heart set on ponying up ten billion yen, then we shouldn't be seeing her again anytime soon…or later."

____________

Just because Duel Academy was one of those formal schools, didn't mean its denizens didn't lose money and small trinkets in cushions of their chairs or behind furniture. They wouldn't be human if they didn't. Sara saw nothing wrong with couch-diving. It was a win-win operation: she and Silpheed could easily collect money that no one else wanted, and all the rooms they rummaged in would get clean.

So they spent the rest of the day hunting in every and any room they had access to, like the duel arena where Ojaman had made his debut or the bedrooms in their own dorm. She wore her autographed bucket for good luck, and carried an ordinary magnet, since they had no fancy metal detector and no one would let them borrow one. Besides, metal detectors were basically magnets with pretty flashing lights.

In one particular room, Sara dissected the couch and tossed the cushions in random directions throughout, while Silpheed helped himself to the panty drawer, for no stone was to be left unturned (he found that as a decent excuse to fiddle with ladies' unmentionables). While no change was yet discovered in this room, she did find a lone Tortilla chip buried in the back, chipped at the corner with a ball of lint crowning the top, like a miniature replica of the island's volcano.

"Awright! More free food!" Couch-diving was ravenous work, so it helped to find nourishment when she did, mostly crusty potato chips and a Cheeto or two, and with Ojaman's lucky signature at its highest potency, half a cookie. She plucked the lint off the chip and nibbled off the top.

She juggled the morsel back and forth in her mouth before swallowing. "Stale," she muttered, "but satisfactorily salty."

"_Ay caramba!" _

She and Silpheed sprang up like two prairie dogs. The resident of the dismantled room stood in the doorway, her brown eyes melting into pools of tamale-hot fury.

Silpheed cracked a whistle: _"RAWK! What brand of salsa are you? Hot, hot, hot!" _He opened his beak wide and stretched out his stubby tongue as far as he could.

_"¡¿Qué están haciendo, demonios?!" _she demanded.

Sara didn't catch that. She glanced at the half-eaten chip, then up at the girl, then back at the chip. She held it up for her to see. "Got nacho cheese?" she asked politely.

The flame-haired girl cupped a hand over her mouth, like she was preparing to puke. "_Ay, grosero! _Eating food out of the sofa? Have you no class?"

Sara popped the rest of the morsel into her mouth. "Waste not, want not. Don't mind us; we're just couch-diving for loose change," she informed her as she licked her fingers.

"And panty-diving, _RAWK!_"

She went back to prodding the sofa with her magnet, oblivious to the girl storming up to her like a Spanish bull until she felt a hand seizing her off of her knees by the ear.

"_OW-OW-OWOWOW! _Hey, I'm still using that ear!" she shrieked.

The Spanish girl jabbed a finger at her nose. "Look, here, _ano estupido! _You better put my room back the way it was—"

"'Anal?'" chuckled Sara, in spite of her pain. Her attacker yanked harder on her ear lobe to silence her. Leaning in dangerously close to her face, she hissed:

"You better put my room back the way it was, or _mi amor _Ty-Ty will have to teach you a lesson…"

That word, Sara recognized; she heard it all the time around Valentine's Day. But wasn't "amor" supposed to be French? "…Wha?"

"Tyson, of course!"

Sara's eyes widened. "Wow, you're dating a boxer? Wait…isn't he, like, dead now?"

"_RAWK! _Grave-robber!"

"Nooooo, he's not dead! And that's not who I'm talking about!" She dragged Sara across the room with her to flail an arm at Silpheed.

"Shoo, shoo, _parásito! _Back off from my _unmentionables!_"

Leaving one of her bras dangling out of the drawer by a hook, Silpheed fluttered over to the opposite side of the room, hitching onto her canopy. "_RAWK! _Latina spitfire…sexy!" he cackled.

"Leave Silpheed alone! We just want your change!" Sara waved the magnet around as if doing so would get her ear back. What it did do was latch onto the girl's earring, so that they both had a grip on each other's ears. Neither one enjoyed herself, needless to say.

The girls tangled and tangoed in a circle across the room, the Spaniard unwilling to let go of Sara's ear, Sara trying to pull the magnet off of her earring (she might as well have tried to take the whole ear), with more than just a slab of foreign cursing on the disgruntled girl's part. Silpheed stayed on the canopy, cheering them both on.

"Ty-Ty, help me! _¡Ayúdame!_"

"What's that mean, 'leggo my ear?' 'Cause I'd be happy to leggo your ear if you leggo mine, _poor favor_!"

"It's _por favor, machacha loca_!"

So Sara took the initiative and released the magnet dangling from the back of the Spaniard's ear lobe, thus breaking their tango around the desk by the open window. She in turn released Sara's ear lobe and sent her rear end colliding into the desk.

To the girl's utter dismay, she had had her boom box sitting precariously on the corner; the instant Sara's butt rammed into the desk, the impact sent it flying out the window. All she did was watch in horror as it tumbled down the side of the building before meeting a violent end on the concrete far below them.

_Crash! _

The Spanish girl's hair flopped over her face like a wrinkled red funeral veil as she dropped to her knees and hung over the sill, arms draped uselessly in front of her. For once, she fell silent.

Sara rubbed her sore bottom as she peeked out the window over the girl. "Wh-What, what happened? Oh…uh-oh. Boom box go boom-boom, huh? Or as you might say, boom box go _la bamba?_"

The girl, who had her favorite Latin music CD in there before she lost it forever, just started wailing in uncontrollable Spanish, her head buried in her arms. Seeing her shudder with sobs suddenly made the pain in Sara's butt seem insignificant. She lowered herself to the mourner's level and touched her shoulder.

"Hey, hey, don't cry. Maybe it was time for it to go home to the Radio Shack in the sky? Maybe they'll send you a new one?" Boy, if she had the money, she could perhaps replace it herself. She stopped to take off her hat, in which she kept a small empty oatmeal container marked "Money." Popping it open and spilling the contents in her hand, she tapped on the girl's head.

She whirled around and glared at her, her running mascara striping her olive cheeks. Sara took her hand and dropped everything they had found so far since they had started into her palm. Duel Academy was a big place; surely they would find more loose change to compensate?

Sara smiled. "And if they don't, use this to buy a new one. Five hundred yen; hope it helps. Now how's about we see a smile?"

She didn't get a smile. Instead, she got a girl standing up straight and tall, nostrils flaring, hair raised as if she were a bull ready to gut her with her horns. But she didn't charge at them; she threw the offering to the ground and started gushing out another furious stream of Spanish…or to be precise, switching back and forth between Spanish and English, making some sort of threat about this "Tyson" character coming around to set them straight. The magnet swung around with every swivel of her head.

Sara started to back away, because frankly, even if she couldn't comprehend, the girl was starting to scare her. She tried to keep the smile on her face, though, squeaked, "You're welcome," as she reached up to rip Silpheed, who was looking around for a rose, off the canopy and slipped out the door.

"_RAWK! Call me, señorita!" _

That marked the end of the hunt, in the girls' dorm, anyway. However, after that, Sara kept a fleeting lookout for a guy with boxer gloves.

___________

5:15, read the digital clock on Zane's night stand. As of 5:15, it had been nine hours since Syrus had confiscated his deck, and he had not returned since then. Trapped in a spell of inertia, Zane hadn't been left to many devices other than the T.V. remote and his imagination as to what kind of rigorous training his brother must've been subjecting himself to. Atticus hadn't visited since two days before. Not that he expected him to show up every hour, on the hour; he had his own problems to deal with. They all did.

Since he'd found nothing on the T.V. except the usual sundry jive, he fixed his eyes on the bleak white ceiling. He wondered if the deck would cause Syrus as much pain as it caused him. He wondered how Syrus was holding up. He wondered about his opponent, Makoto—who technically, had become Syrus's opponent, as of the previous night—and what kind of tricks he planned in order to destroy his dojo. Zane didn't usually fiddle away his time by wondering so much, but when one was stuck in bed with no deck, no company and nothing watchable on T.V., what else could he do?

He wondered in the back of his mind if it'd always be that way from then on: lying there with the shades pulled shut, asinine as the fear was (dare he consider it a fear, even an anxiety). He rolled over so he faced the closet door, his eyelids becoming heavy with tiredness.

Zane could've fallen asleep, had a ruckus not bolted his eyelids wide open—

_**VVRRRRRRR!**_

—the sputtering of a vacuum cleaner's engine. A ruckus that drilled so thoroughly into his skull that it had to be close, somewhere in the very room he rested in.

He turned in the opposite direction, towards the window. Someone was in his room, all right, completely oblivious to the fact that a patient was trying to get some much-needed sleep as she caught the string inside the hose and yanked the shades up to the top. The afternoon sunlight flooded the room and pierced Zane's eyes.

Well, actually, there were _two _people, or to be more accurate, a person and a bird. He noticed the bird's crest feathers protruding from the top of the lamp shade, for birds didn't like loud noises that didn't come from their own beaks.

He recognized the silhouetted bird in the lamp shade, right away, as he did the girl with the vacuum cleaner…not that he was too happy to see them. He would've gone with perfect isolation over _their _presence. Heaven knew how they managed to waltz in, but he knew one thing: he'd see them out.

Screaming over a vacuum never did anyone any good, so he mustered up whatever strength he had regained to sit up in bed. Sure enough, he found the power cord attached to an outlet on the floor, between the lamp and the night stand. With a little strain, he leaned over and wrapped his fingers around the cord, then pulled.

The vacuum cleaner died with a fleeting growl. As soon as it did, Sara stopped pressing the hose against the window sill. She held it up to her face and peeked down the hole. "Hey, what gives? Silpheed, did you kill the power again?"

The cockatoo's head popped out of the lamp shade. "Nuh-uh! Talk to Buzzkill! _RAWK!_"

Sara turned around. As soon as she noticed Zane sitting in bed, holding up the cord like a fisherman with a catch, she flashed that trademark infantile smile. "Well, I'll be! What'cha doing here, Ziti?" How amazing that no matter what kind of encounter they'd had before, she'd be just as cheery when she returned, like it'd rolled off her back like a duck.

"This is my room," he answered, stopping himself before he could say "you twit."

"Oh. Oh, right. Here I was, thinking that this was Don's room. You know, Don…Keybutt?" Judging by her lip-biting giggling, Zane guessed that that was a lame joke that was supposed to get him to say something stupid. He didn't bite.

"Whatever hair-brained scheme—"

"Ah, ah, ah! We prefer the term 'birdbrained scheme,' thank you."

Zane narrowed his eyes. No matter what term was used to describe the scheme, it would still be something obnoxious. Anything associated with Scinner was bound to be obnoxious. "Whatever scheme you're up to this time, how's about taking it somewhere else?"

Squawked Silpheed, "Like up the butt?_ RAWK-AWK-AWK!_"

Sara's giggling combusted into full-fledged cackling. She held onto her sides and lurched over, like she'd been punched in the gut. "Or-Or-Or up…up the donkey butt!" She laughed even harder, if that was possible, until she became cherry-red and wound up tripping over the vacuum cleaner and landing—_THUD!_—on her rear with her legs caught over the machine.

Zane felt like an old lion beleaguered by hyenas. _All of that laughter can't possibly be normal. _

She raised her head to wipe a tear out of her eye. "Don't you love toilet humor?" she wheezed.

"No. Now take your vacuum and leave."

"Aw, come on, we don't mean no harm!" Zane couldn't help but notice that double-negative, as if it were her clumsy way of saying, "We mean harm."

"We're just cleaning up—"

_Cleaning up what, your act?_

"—your room!"

Well, that made as much sense as a deck that gave you a heart condition. No, actually, _that _made much more sense than busting in to clean a hospital room, which had a reputation of sterility in the first place.

Sara, tongue in cheek, noticed his coat hanging from a chair. "Your coat's looking kind of dirty. Like us to shake it out?"

"I'd much rather that you left my things alone." Predictably, Sara didn't listen. As soon as she pulled herself off the vacuum and the floor, she yanked it off the chair by the broad shoulders and held it up like a sheet going on a clothesline. Its tail trailed along the floor, being bigger than the person holding it.

"Boy, this thing's sandy! What were you doing yesterday, building sand castles with Atty?" She hopped in a circle, waving the coat all around like a patriotic flag until handkerchiefs of sand coated the floor and the foot of Zane's bed.

"_RAWK! _Sand castles?" cried Silpheed, as though they'd done _much _more than build sand castles.

Why did he have to be bedridden today? On the other hand, predicaments like this were the reason the merciful King of Games gave people the nurse call button. Zane wasted no time in pressing that device with all the finger strength he had.

Unfortunately, Miss Fontaine didn't show up quick enough. Sara dropped the coat on the table and exclaimed, "Looks like a job for Mr. Suckerman!" While she scrambled for the power cord—which Zane had made the mistake of releasing as soon as he'd unplugged it—Silpheed kept chanting, "Suck! Suck! Suck!" in the background.

It turned out that Sara's foot had flipped a switch on the vacuum when she had tripped over it, from "suck" to "blow" (why vacuums would even have switches like that, Zane could never figure out, sharp as he was). The instant Sara thrust the plug into the outlet, Mr. Suckerman became Mr. _Blower_man. It rattled the atmosphere with its hiss, spouting out thick, rusty swirls of dirt wherever the writhing hose pointed that had Zane wondering if she'd been previously sweeping up the whole outdoors.

"_Mr. Suckerman!" _shrieked Sara, tackling the machine like a wrestler and somehow getting tangled up in the hose and being ineffectual in general. Silpheed just ducked into the lamp shade to wait out the commotion. So Zane bent over the side of the bed to pull the plug, again.

By the time he had, the air had become so grainy and polluted that everyone present came down with a coughing fit. Zane could've sworn that he'd pulled an intercostal muscle with that last cough: a milder injury than a heart attack, but painful, nevertheless. Dust frosted his sinuses.

All of that happened before Miss Fontaine burst through the door, clipboard nestled under her arm. "What's going on in here?" she demanded.

Had he not known any better, Zane might've asked, "What the fuck took you so long?" But since he did know better, and because his hand was cupped over his mouth, he scowled with his eyes and gestured to Sara with his other hand.

She looked up, her face feverish and caked with dirt. "M-Miss F.! Ah, M-M-Mr. Suckerman threw up all over the place; y-you ought to look at him!" She would've handed the lifeless vacuum for Fontaine to see for herself, had she not still had the hose knotted around her shoulders. She looked so…pitiful, squirming around on the floor like an unearthed worm, with Fontaine squatting down to help ease her out of the tangle.

He couldn't help but feel almost remotely sorry for her. Even if that person was a ditz, it was difficult to scorn someone wrapped around a vacuum hose on the floor while one was trapped in bed, which he soon transitioned from to his wheelchair out in the lobby until his room was fit to breathe in again. And it wasn't so much that he scorned people, really; he simply preferred to be alone, especially if all they were going to do was make nuisances of themselves.

Was "nuisance" the proper word for this case? It sounded like an understatement. Whatever the term, the incident with Mr. Suckerman didn't chase her off. Almost fifteen minutes later, as he gazed out at the view, she and her pet snuck up on him. Well, the idea was to sneak up behind him, but he could hear her footsteps squeaking against the linoleum before she made it across the room. With a gait as bold and noisy as hers, sneakiness was impossible. Besides, he saw her reflection in the glass.

His eyes remained on the outside. He sensed her energy as she leaned in too close to his ear and said, "Nice view, huh?" Like they were chums.

"Ooh, I think I see gulls out there!" Her arm jetted by his head. "See those white feathery specks? Look how far they're going." How old did she think he was, four?

"_RAWK! _Going all the way!" It felt as though a needle had been shoved into his ear; how could anyone stand having a chatty cockatoo on his shoulder all of the time? He wheeled away from them by a foot or two, all the while keeping his eyes on the sky.

"Huh? Oh…hey, um, we're sorry we trashed your room, Ziti. It it's any consolation, we didn't find any loose change. We'd've cleaned up the mess ourselves, except Miss F. said we can't mess around with Mr. Suckerman, anymore."

_THAT'S why you barged into my room, to look for change? After all the hell you've raised here, what I'm wondering is why Miss Fontaine hasn't kicked you out. _

"How're you feeling? Have you mended your heart yet?"

"Whatever happened to keeping to yourself?" he grumbled.

For perhaps the first time since they'd met, silence fell between the three of them, however brief. Then Zane saw her arm dangling over his head, blocking his view of outside. She waved her deck in front of the tip of his nose, almost close enough to scratch it.

"Hey, I know what'll cheer you up: a good, clean, old-fashioned, just-for-kicks duel! What'd'ya say?"

"No, thanks."

He heard her heels squeaking backwards, her gasp knocking the wind out of her. "A rejection to a _duel?!_ Even we know that's not normal, 'specially coming from you! Silpheed, quick, pinch him out of it!"

Zane could see her obliging pet's reflection hovering over his shoulder, but he shot up a hand before he could get there and start pinching holes into his cheek. "I'm thinking quite clearly, thank you very much."

"If that's true, then how come you don't want to play?"

"Number one: I don't play; I duel. Number two: I don't duel 'just for kicks.' Number three: even if I did want to duel with you, I couldn't—"

"'Cause you're in a wheelchair? Don't you still have your arms? You only really need your arms to duel, and a heart and a head. Besides, we're on wheels all the time, and we still get around! Standing's overrated, anyhow."

"_RAWK! _Concur!"

"—duel without a deck," he deadpanned. The response was another short-lived bout of silence.

Sara shoved her tongue into her cheek. "Huh…guess you're right about that; if you don't have a deck, then you're just playing charades—what happened to yours? Oh, my gosh…you're not, like, _quitting, _are you?" she asked in an uncharacteristically quiet voice.

"That's none of your business, is it?"

"We're only asking because we care."

"_Tch, _you and everyone else on this God-forsaken planet."

Suddenly, her reflection reddened to a beet shade. Sara stamped both her feet, her tone swinging to the other extreme. "Well, you know, Sunshine, I might be a selfish shellfish and all, but if caring about people and wanting to see them happy makes me selfish somehow, at least it's a good kind of selfish! I think.

"You? I-I may not know how you broke your heart, but from where I can see, you're too selfish to let it mend! B-Bad-selfish!"

Silpheed looked too stupefied to crack a crude one. That pout on her lips quickly shielded itself behind her hands as she swayed to and fro, her face aghast with the realization of what she'd just said.

Zane hadn't been yelled at like that since the days when his friends badgered him to go back to his old ways. She hadn't called him "Sunshine" in a long time. He felt no offense, nor rage nor spite nor pain. Rather, he raised an eyebrow, slackened his jaw, said not a word.

_How passionate. She almost convinced me that she knows what she's talking about…almost. And this is coming from a girl who trashed my room just so she could find loose change. _

Zane turned around to watch her and Silpheed vanish. When they did, he folded his arms over his chest and shook his head, unable to decide between mild amusement and pity.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	8. Act Eight

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. Goodness, can you imagine the rental fees I pay to do this? This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Act Eight**_

_I can't believe I yelled at him like that! I've never yelled at anyone, before—okay, that's a lie. But it's one thing when you're the yellee…and it's a whole lot worse when you're the yeller. _

If there was anything in the world that could strike a pin of shame into Sara's soul, it would be unraveling at someone else's expense. She hated being angry. It made her brain throb, lit her face on fire, and when it cooled off—however quickly—it left her drained. Not that she could avoid it; in the grand scheme of things, no one could. The least she could do was keep from channeling personal hurt to others. Besides, responding to anger with anger was one of the worst things one could do.

Then again, while anger was a negative feeling, it was still a feeling; she stunk at holding back feelings. Back at the infirmary, she had felt herself building up with the stuff like a clogged toilet when one flushed too much paper down it. Her fingers dug into the sand as she remembered how she'd blown up like the clogged toilet that'd been flushed too many times without any plunger applied to it. She hadn't even the courtesy to apologize for it.

Somehow, she was sure that that alone had been bad-selfish. Fancy acting bad-selfish while telling somebody that _they _were bad-selfish! What did they call that?

"Silpheed?"

Silpheed, who had been watching out for attractive girls in bikinis the whole time they'd been sitting by the seaside, blinked. _"RAWK?"_

"Do they got a name for someone who says one thing, and does exactly the opposite?"

"You mean a hypocrite?" snapped a new voice. The duo turned their heads to find Missy Mandible standing in front of them, wearing a frilly pink bikini and slinging a fluffy towel over her shoulder. Her hand was on her hip.

Silpheed's eyes glistened like stars. "_RAAAAAAWK! Taaaaaake it off_!" he whistled.

Missy tried to melt the bird's head off with her Evil Eye. "Sorry, but I'm not looking for a dumb bird. I'm not looking for anybody, really: I'm just here because I felt like it."

Sara traced the inside of her cheek with her tongue. "A hippo-crite, huh? That sounds about right. My mouth is bigger than my whole head, and I like to go swimming." That word, "hippo-crite," left a sharp and bitter aftertaste in her mouth, like that cheese with a name she couldn't recall off the top of her head.

_I'm not just a shellfish, I'm a hippo-crate, too. Geez, I should be out in the lake, rolling in moss. _

On the other hand, she did mean everything she'd said. So she didn't know the entire story behind Ziti's condition, but why else would he refuse to duel? Was his heart broken that badly? Or was it because his die-hard ambitions wouldn't let it mend? Did being the best really matter that much?

"I yelled at Ziti for being bad-selfish," she confessed to Missy, her eyes staring at the white sand below her. "I meant what I said, but…I didn't mean it to hurt his feelings."

Missy, who had started to move on down the beach, stopped and wrinkled her nose. "He deserves a lot more than a lecture, definitely a lot more than whatever idiot rant you gave him. Besides, I wouldn't worry about hurting his 'feelings;' he has none."

How could she say that about someone she liked? "I thought you liked him?"

"_Feh, _you know how it is…no, you probably don't. Men will sweep you off your feet, then they'll sweep you off their shoulder."

_I wouldn't be so sure about that. Farley swept _me_ off my feet, but he sure didn't stop talking to me. _

Silpheed stretched a wing out, trying to grab her attention. "_RAWK! _I'd sweep _you _off your feet!"

Sara could see bitterness flash in Missy's eyes. She would've said something about it, that it did no good to speak angrily about someone who did you wrong. But considering the events of earlier, wouldn't that make her a "hippo-crite?"

_I've got to go back and apologize, _she thought in the back of her mind.

For the moment, however, because it was her way to change the subject when the current matter got too heavy, she asked Missy, "Do you know where we could find a job?" Besides, they still had an empty oatmeal can. That ten billion yen wouldn't make itself.

She stared them both as if Sara had shoved her tongue up her nose. "What the hell do I look like, the Classifieds?"

Sara rubbed the back of her head. "Well, no; if you did, you'd smell like ink and I could fold you into an airplane and you'd have words written all over you."

"Like 'Your Face Here!' _RAWK!_"

"We're just trying to make some money, and you make money by having a job, right? Except no one here will—"

"Get a job? That's a laugh!" roared Missy. "Only lower middle-class jerks get jobs!"

As much as it made her proud to say something laughable, Sara was going to point out she and Silpheed were middle-class, but Missy rambled over them: "No, no, what you _really _want to do is start your _own_ business. Be an entrepreneur! You'll get all the profit, and you won't have to pay taxes when you get paid."

An entrepreneur? Was that French? "Wow, you can make money by tripping? We're _really _good at that."

Missy huffed, "No, dumbass, an entrepreneur is someone who sells things, like goods or services."

Oh, so "entrepreneur" was French for "salesman?" W.T.F: what terrific fun! Plus, they wouldn't have to worry about getting fired, again. But what could they sell?

She noticed a lone white, spiny seashell half-buried where her fingers had been digging into the sand. Picking it up and holding it in front of the declining sun, she squinted at it. "How about we sell seashells? We could build a stand out here on the seashore and sell seashells by it."

"_RAWK! She shells shesells by the—RAWK!" _Even birds twist their tongues, sometimes.

Missy rolled her eyes. "How about you sell something that people would actually _want_ to buy?"

Sara's tongue found its way back into her cheek. After a moment, she said, "What about dueling cards? People buy cards, don't they?"

"That depends. You have a license?" In a society where card games were what one needed to make it anywhere, and could be used as deadly weapons, the law required that one had a license to distribute them. Otherwise, one could be accused of involvement with the "black market."

_Aw, you need a license to do _anything_ nowadays, don't you? _

Okay, maybe they could sell a _service, _instead? Sara liked serving people. Question was, what could they do?

Luckily, it didn't take her very long to figure that out. She snapped her fingers.

"_Messengers! _We'll base our business on messenging!" She and Silpheed had tons of experience in that field. They delivered newspapers in the summers. They once "delivered" Ziti to Duel Academy when they needed him. And when she was eight, she snuck onto the mail truck to give Mel the mailman a birthday card during his lunch break; by that time, his route had taken him two miles from her street.

She got grounded for a week for that escapade, but that was neither here nor there. Plus, since they'd be self-employed, she could find the time to deliver an apology to old Ziti.

Missy voiced her opinion for that idea, as well: "Messengers? Oh, please! We have cell phones and PDAs and E-mails to talk to each other with; where's the need for a messenger? Besides, I wouldn't trust you to tell that guy over there that I wanted him to eat out with me." She pointed to Bob the quiz boy from some thirty feet away, dancing around with a tiny crab clinging to his foot.

Of course, she had meant that sarcastically. But Sara? She and Silpheed left a fissure in the sand behind them as they sped towards the target. Bob had finally punted that crab back into the ocean and had started to nurse his toe when they towered over him.

She tapped on the top of his head. "Are you Mr. That Guy Over There?"

Bob looked up with sea water and tears staining his eyes. "H-Huh?"

Sara gestured to a dumbfounded Missy. "Missy Mandible wants you to eat her out," she announced with a broad smile, forming an L-shape over her head. "Message delivered, courtesy of the Sonic Express!"

"_RAWK, _lucky bastard!" growled Silpheed.

For some reason, Bob's face became as red as his swollen toe before he collapsed onto the sand; _probably from excitement, _thought Sara. She helped him back to a slumping sitting position before zooming across the same fissure in the ground back to her customer (and deepening it into a ravine).

Missy's arms hung like streamers in front of her, her left eye twitching at the corner. "What did you just tell him?" she asked.

Grinned Sara, "That you wanted him to eat you out. How long'd that take us, twenty seconds? Besides, PDAs and cell phones run on batteries that you have to recharge; we do not. Why, I think it's right to say that we would be the most energy-'ficient means of messaging, around!"

She stretched out her open hand. "And all for the totally-not-selfish fee of two hundred yen, please." She always did find it silly to pay a monthly bill for such kinds of technology. Their service would be at least ten times cheaper, with no "hidden fees" and whatnot, and their customers could have, say, twenty messages sent with that money they spent on bills.

Which only showed the outsider what kind of grasp she had on money.

When Missy didn't say a word, Sara grew concerned. "Okay, how 'bout _one _hundred yen?"

Missy hung her head, her hair arching over her back like a pair of wings preparing to take their owner off into the skies.

Without looking up at either of them, she hissed, "You're a perfect waste of DNA and sarcasm. Why have I bothered talking to you?"

Sara exchanged looks with Silpheed, unsure of what she meant by that, only that it sounded angry. She'd learned her lesson about responding to anger with anger. So she tittered the nicest, most fitting words she could think to say: "What are friends and messengers for? We're just doing our job."

____________

It was right to do nice things for people upon their request, but even righter when one did nice things _without _requests. A single face alight with joy, powered by surprise, could light up an entire room brighter than fifty light bulbs, plus a disco ball (not that Duel Academy had any disco balls hanging around, since there was no practical use for them).

That was one reason Sara and Silpheed took initiatives for their messenger business, the Sonic Express. The other was because no one came up to ask them to do anything. Sara wasn't sure why; with the sign that they'd started carrying around, and the business cards—all hand-drawn and duplicated by the machine in Chancellor Sheppard's office—that they snuck in people's books, pockets and food, how could they be overlooked?

Since everyone else seemed either oblivious or shy, Sara and Silpheed took it upon themselves to keep their eyes and ears peeled for any opportunity to do their job. Like the following day in the middle of class, when they noticed Reginald van Howell III in front of them when Sara should've been listening to the teacher.

The boy's eyes were on the professor, but as she peeked over his shoulder and squinted, she could make out a doodle on the corner of his paper of a girl with black hair and a spunky smile. Why, it looked like Mindy.

Reginald put down his pencil and sighed longingly. Nowadays in class, the kids didn't speak out loud unless the teacher asked them a question. Being so far into the year, they seldom risked whispering to one another or passed notes. But that didn't mean they were all _entirely _focused on the lesson. They dropped clues on what they were thinking about, like doodles, things that the two needed to pick up if their business was going to work.

Sara waved her arm around like an airport baton, because it was class etiquette to raise one's arm to say something. The teacher called on her: "Yes, Sara?"

"Mindy? Mindy? I've an important message for Mindy!"

Mindy, who sat in the front row, turned around with a quizzical look. Her best friend Jasmine followed suit.

Sara stood up in her seat and pointed at a stunned Reginald. "Reggie likes you!" she announced at the top of her lungs.

What a riot she incited! Most of the class burst out laughing like bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap. The more mature peers exchanged acidic looks, some directed towards Sara. Mindy's cheeks burned so red that they made Jasmine's hair look pale, while poor Reginald shrunk in his seat, like a turtle retreating into his shell.

Unable to see the look on her "customer's" face, she leaned over and cheered, "Message delivered, courtesy of the Sonic Express! That'll be one hundred yen, please." Silpheed wiggled in her jacket, his hiding place.

In the real world, they had several names for that kind of behavior: "nosiness," "nuisance," and the worst one, depending on the damage it dealt, "bullying." Not only that, but Sara had violated an unwritten rule at Duel Academy: only Atticus Rhodes, the romantic guru, had the authority to announce crushes, and he did that when people were comfortable with it. But in her mind, she was only doing her job, in the best way she knew how.

No money was transferred. After a bit more of that nonsense, no one did anything during class except work, so she couldn't find anything to turn any of them into the next victim of public humiliation. They reproached her with silence and dirty looks. If they weren't forced to stay in their seats, they probably would've all moved to the other side of the room.

In short, the business quickly became a bust, had it not already been a bust from square one. So she and Silpheed decided to try a different approach.

____________

Rather than touch anything on his tray, Zane chewed on the sobering words of the daily paper_. _The nurse had urged him to build up his strength with nourishment, but he didn't expect himself to eat even the gelatin when his stomach felt like it was filled with cement. Reading was the most stimulating thing he could do at the moment, but in truth, only his eyes savored the tiny words on the crisp, inky pages. His mind, on the other hand, lingered on the rematch, just a day and a night away.

Syrus still hadn't come back. He must've been taking his training seriously. Admirable as that was, a part of Zane, who had always taken pride in fighting his own battles, wished _he _could be out there training. Or at the very least, be out there with his brother.

_But even if I could be out there, what could I do? Syrus has been growing up, getting along fine for the past couple of years without me. That is what I wanted for him. _

Somehow in his pensive state of mind, he noticed two articles adjacent to each other: one concerning Chazz Princeton making his debut as the superstar Ojaman (who knew that Chazz would turn out to be a sell-out, or for that matter, adopt such an asinine taste in attire?), the other about Aster Phoenix "indefinitely" retiring from the Pro Leagues. Phoenix, of all people.

Zane didn't know whether to smirk or feel sorry for the kid, having considered Phoenix as one far too young and pompous to retire from the Leagues, volitionally, at least. The article didn't specify the reasons; only mentioned that he had been coaching Chazz for some time before he made his debut as Ojaman. _"Perhaps it was time for the torch to pass down to the next generation of stars?" _it read.

Too bad; Phoenix was one of the few worthy duelists Zane had met since he'd graduated, and that wasn't just because he was one of the pinch who had defeated him. He found it difficult to believe that he'd teach Chazz to make a laughingstock out of himself.

_Then again, the Pro Leagues are overrated, _he thought, remembering the current status of his own career. _With sell-outs like "Ojaman" taking over, he probably made one of the best decisions of his life._

_Thmp-thmp, THUMP! Thmp-thmp, THUMP! _

He looked over the corner of the page. Who else did he find in the window waving at him with their faces smearing the glass but Scinner and the feathered sex-fiend?

Zane sighed. _What does she want this time, a hand-out?_

Unable to leave his bed, he stared back at them. Either the two couldn't bear it any longer—not too many could oppose him in a staring contest—or they realized that he wasn't moving and that they could just waddle in through the door, but that's what they did, uninvited, as usual.

Except they didn't just waddle in; Sara tore open the door, blew a shrill, sour note from her kazoo—_VOOOOOOO!_—and facetiously exclaimed, "Mail call for Mr. Ziti!" _Then _she waddled a beeline over his bedside, twirling her old pack around by the strap.

She stopped to unzip it and fish out the contents: a couple fat stacks of envelopes and a small package. "Hoo-wee, your box looked like it was gonna blow! You've sure got a lot of friends thinking about you, Ziti!"

Zane lowered the paper. Since he fired his agent so very long ago, he'd handle his own mail, how he wanted it to be. Even if he didn't get many important things—mostly junk mail, endorsements, and letters from googly-eyed fans—he couldn't help but feel a bit violated. "So that's your new hobby, stealing other people's mail? Last I checked, that was a federal offense. And there's a difference between friends and fans."

"Nuh-uh, we didn't _look_ in any of it! Except at the labels, so we could, you know, see who it was for. We're just delivering the mail for people; is that wrong?" She placed it all but the package on Zane's lap.

"They've already hired people for that. They're called mail carriers."

Sara made a funny face. "You don't accuse _them_ of stealing your mail. Speaking of which, you got something from…um…what's this word, here?" She pointed at the word "Ophthalmology" in the corner of the label. "Opho…Oepho…thalma…"

"Mine," Zane answered briskly, snatching the package out of her hand. It had to be his new contact lenses. Syrus wasn't the only one in their family with poor eyesight, but rather than wear glasses, which irritated the skin around his nose and made him look ridiculous, he wore contact lenses. They were more convenient.

Sara jabbed her tongue into her cheek. "I dunno, that's kind of a long word for it to be 'mine.'"

"'Penis' no long word! _RAWK!_" squawked Silpheed. "Maybe." Sometimes one had to wonder how Sara went and taught her bird to talk like that, when she herself couldn't pronounce "ophthalmology."

"But it's got a picture of an eye on it…why, Ziti, did you order a new pair of eyes?"

He set his mail aside. "That's none of your business. And since I've got my mail, there's no need for you to be here any longer."

"Why'd you order new eyes? We like your eyes. Don't we, Silpheed?"

_You and every other girl in the world…plus one or two guys. _

"Are they broken?" she asked, leaning into him much closer than he would've liked her to. The smile slunk away from her face. "Are they broken…like your heart is?"

_Oh, here we go again._

Fortunately, she pulled away. Unfortunately, she pulled up a seat and made herself comfortable beside him, a clear indication that she had no intention of leaving until she said everything she wanted to say. Her feet tapped against the floor, in a rimshot kind of rhythm.

"Listen, Ziti, I…I'm sorry about what I said yesterday. I didn't mean it to hurt your feelings."

Zane raised an eyebrow. _She honestly believes she hurt my…? _

"I've heard worse." Compared to what people used to tell him when he hit rock bottom, she might as well as hit him with a pillow stuffed with down feathers and ran for it.

She attempted to establish eye contact with him. "But you know, I did mean what I said. Eyes can be ordered through the mail, but I'm pretty sure a heart can't. And you can't fix it if you won't let it heal. I think you're too bad-selfish to let it heal because you're hurting yourself over your desire for victory."

"_RAWK! _Masochist!"

Zane narrowed his eyes. What would _she _know about pain and suffering? "And you're not?" he said coldly.

Sara put up her hands and said, "Hey, hey, I never said I wasn't selfish! I just said that if I have to be any kind of selfishness, it would be good-selfish."

His lips inched into a bitter smile. "Why? Because you squander your potential to make others laugh?"

"W-Well, we like to see people happy. It makes us happy—"

"Don't you think _that's_ selfish, one way or another? Intentionally tripping up over yourself so _others _can feel good? Doesn't _that_ hurt?"

Sara and Silpheed were quiet for a moment or three. "I…I guess," she answered softly, beginning to lose the eye contact with him. "If you count all the bumps and cuts and bruises, and the occasional sprain. But in the end, it's all worth it!"

Zane nodded. "Exactly. I suffer for my own goals, in a different way. Everyone does. But in the end, as you just said, it's all worth it when we reach them. Sure, I suppose everyone's looking for some sort of happiness, but life would be empty and pointless if we didn't feel pain. Sometimes you have to pay Life Points to win a duel. Happiness works in the same way: it has no real value if one didn't have to take a beating to get it. That sort of happiness is just a cheap laugh."

Sara looked at him as though he'd just spoken in tongues, her tongue jabbed so deeply into her cheek that it threatened to bust a hole through it. Silpheed just wore an absent-minded expression common to his species and order.

"And touching on the matter of selfishness…fine, I'm selfish. But tell me, what are you doing with yourself?"

Sara's mouth made an O-shape, surprised that he'd hold the slightest interest in her future. "Well…me and Silpheed are trying to take off as real comedians, like the ones on T.V. That's why we were looking for loose change, 'cause it turns out that you need money to do it. We even got Ojaman's autograph for good luck!" She tilted her head forward so he could see the bold black signature on the top of her bucket-hat.

"…You might not want to hear it, but in your own way, you're selfish, too. Everyone is."

She looked as though he'd just slapped her in both cheeks. "E-E-Even Jaden, or that Phoenix kid?"

Zane nodded again. "The mere fact that everyone wants happiness brands us as selfish. But that doesn't make us all terrible people. No one could ever hope to survive in this world—or any world—if they weren't selfish to some degree. And really, there's no such thing as 'good-selfish' or 'bad-selfish,' just 'selfishness'…and 'self_less_ness', the reason people have and are friends and family. Everyone has a little of both, though some may seem more selfless, others more self_ish_."

Sara's eyes widened to the size of ping-pong balls. "So…I'm selfish, but I'm self_less_, too?" She clutched the side of her head as if her brain could not compute everything—or anything—he was saying and was on the verge of short-circuiting. He didn't expect her to.

"Wh-What about you? Who do you fight for besides just yourself?"

_Used to be for my deck, _he thought, but didn't mention aloud. Instead, he told her, "You don't need to know that. And if you don't believe a word I've said, that's fine. When you get out there, you'll see it all for yourself. That is, if you'll bother to look." As much as it tore him up to see someone, even one like Sara, waste their potential, he couldn't tell her how to run her life any more than she could tell him how to run his. He didn't want to.

The girl and her pet stared at him for what felt like an eternity, her arms hung uselessly at her sides, with one of the most clueless looks he had ever seen.

Then:

"So…we're still friends?"

That all rolled off her back like a duck, didn't it? Hell, Zane might as well have spoken to one, the whole time.

Nevertheless, he decided not to call her out on it. If he had, then the argument would escalate, and she would _never _leave. He muttered, "Whatever."

"Forgiveness!" She snaked an arm around his neck, tilting him in her direction, while her knuckles dug into his scalp in a powerful but affectionate noogie. He could've sworn he was forming blisters up there from the countless times she had attacked him.

"_RAWK! _Kiss and make up!"

Fortunately, Sara didn't have kissing in mind. She gushed, "Whatever it is you're up to, promise us that you'll bet getter—I mean, get better, soon! Even if pain's supposed to be…valuable, you shouldn't have it all the time! And don't you _ever _quit dueling!"

"I'll keep that in mind."

As Zane held onto Sara's arm and tried to pry her off, she asked him, "Hey, um, just throwing it out there, how come you haven't touched your food? Aren't you hungry?"

"Not really."

"Are you sure? Because your Jell-o's looking a little runny."

"If you want it, it's yours, if you can let go of my head."

"Dealio!" She let go of his head, then dove for the spork and gelatin cup like a falcon. She swiped off the plastic sheet covering it and dropped it onto the tray in a tiny crumpled ball.

She shoveled a fat chunk of wiggly green, fruit-filled gelatin, holding it up to the tip of her nose to admire its color and texture and jiggly-ness. "Ah, green, fruit-filled Jell-o! What could be better? Green's my favorite color, y'know…but don't tell the other colors of the rainbow, heh-heheh!"

"_RAWK! _Mine pink! Guess why!"

_Does it look like I care?_

"You sure you don't want any? Because I don't wanna be self—"

"Just eat it, already," said Zane wearily. He vaguely hoped that she'd take the gelatin with her, but she did no such thing.

Sara had a "unique" way of consuming gelatin; if not unique, then certainly gross. Rather than swallow it like a normal person, her face puffed up as she sloshed it around the inside of her mouth, like it was mouth wash. Just listening to the stuff swooshing between her teeth almost made Zane feel queasy…and not a lot of things made him queasy.

She also had a queer way of swallowing it, when she finally got to that part. She didn't swallow; she _gulped_, like a trout, which was odd for someone who loved birds. After she gulped, she dropped the spork and the cup. Her right eye started to twitch and tear up.

_What, is she allergic to pears? _

The chair clamored to the floor as she shot out of it. "_**WAAAAAAAH! FIRE, FIRE! MY TONGUE'S FRYING LIKE A TENDERLOIN!**_" She hopped from one foot to another, flapping her arms and spinning in place. Silpheed jumped off of her shoulder to seek shelter in the lamp shade.

Zane was on his way to pressing the nurse call button when she seized the chocolate milk carton off of his tray (without asking if she could). After a moment of frantic fumbling, she ripped it open and downed it within seconds. Streams of creamy brown trickled out of the corners of her mouth, down her outline of her jaw, staining her uniform.

As with the gelatin, she sloshed it about before swallowing hard. When it was over, she slumped against the wall, her breathing ragged. The carton dropped to the floor. "M-Mother of Mirth, here I thought that spicy Jell-o only existed on Neopets!"

"_Damn!" _

Zane caught a glimpse out the window, behind Sara. A very familiar girl with pink beetle-shaped hair was watching them. She must've noticed him noticing her, because soon enough, she slipped out of view, antennae and all, hissing like a cicada.

He looked back at Sara, who seemed oblivious to the spy. "You feel better now?" he asked, his tone not nearly as sympathetic as the words, if at all.

She wiped the milk off her face with her forearm. "Yep. Yep, I think I'm gonna live. Your concern is much—_uuuuurp!_—appreciated. Hmm…" She closed her eyes for a moment or two, as if she were drifting off to sleep right there.

At the same time, Miss Fontaine poked in through the door. The instant she laid eyes on the joker, she said, "Sara! Are you harassing Zane again?"

"No," Sara answered weakly.

Silpheed peeked out of the lampshade. He answered the question for her: "_RAWK! _This's harassing!" He climbed out and hovered down to Zane's lap, only to match eyes with the teeth of a discarded spork before he could pull anything funny.

Zane didn't need to say a word; all it took was a sinister gaze and a spork held out in front of him to have the cockatoo back off. Normally, he wouldn't threaten an animal like that, but if he wanted to keep his nipples intact…

Fontaine folded her arms. "Sara, I don't want to have to, but I won't let you see Zane anymore if all you're going to do is bother him."

Not that he said anything, but Zane didn't mind that idea, one bit.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_


	9. Act Nine

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. Goodness, can you imagine the rental fees I pay to do this? This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**Act Nine**_

After that incident with the Jell-o, Sara and Silpheed scrapped their messaging business for a brand-new idea that had struck her over the head with a frying pan when she had drained that whole carton of chocolate milk. While it was true that one could probably make a lot of money if he didn't keep spending it on trivial things like candy, they wound up going back on that rule so that could _make _money. They were bound to break it some time, anyhow.

They spent all they'd found on chocolate bars.

_Chocolate: happiness wrapped in cellophane, _thought Sara with a mile-wide grin. _If anyone can resist its smooth, sweet goodness, I'd like to know who and how! _It'd be a lie to say that she wasn't tempted once or twice to dig into their stock. Only two thoughts kept her from doing so: seeing the smiles on their potential customers' faces, and collecting that ten billion yen that she was sure would take no time at all.

The feathered pair spent most of that day wandering about the island, looking for customers. True, most of them were concentrated at the campus or dormitories, but there were some who preferred to stray out a little further, like on the beach or in the woods. Sara figured that if they could sell at least one chocolate bar to _everyone _on the island, they would make enough.

During their trek through the woods, she had sent Silpheed to flutter on ahead to catch a birds' eye view with the promise of Silpheed Snacks as a reward. "Wait up, Silpheed!" she cried after him, the wheels of her skates growling along the rugged pathway.

But Silpheed didn't wait up. Rather, the wind—or some other great impact—blew him right back to her. And all she knew of it was the thundering crack of holograms and a mouthful of cockatoo feathers as her partner was thrust into her face. It wasn't long before they were both on the ground: her on her rear, him on her lap, dazed and flinching.

"Love of Farley, what the heck was that?" she sputtered, spitting out a few white feathers. "Silpheed, are you okay?"

Silpheed's feathers fluffed up until he looked like a duster. "_RAWK! _Man!"

"Ah, did you find somebody? Awesome-nity, Silpheed, old buddy, old pal! You deserve _two _Silpheed Snacks for that!" So she whipped out the bag to pinch two Snacks in her fingers, which Silpheed destroyed almost instantly. He was never too dazed for Silpheed Snacks, as long as Sara helped to get them into his beak.

As soon as the two found their feet again, they headed for a patch of thick foliage, parting the branches as they peeked over the top. Sure enough, they found a small clearing. A duelist in rags was crouched in the middle of it with Jinzo-like creatures lined up in a row behind him.

Odd; he didn't wear the standard Duel Academy uniform. Maybe he was a visiting student from elsewhere…a school where the kids went barefoot and wore neat red scarves?

Sara grinned, her hand reaching up to fiddle with her own red scarf as a salesman would fiddle with his tie. She tipped her bucket-hat off of her brow. "Behold: our first customer! I'll warm 'im up, and you come in for the kill. All right…ready, Silpheed?"

"_THE KILL!" _

But before she could spring out of the bushes and yell something random like, "Health to the red scarf," the both of them let out a simultaneous yelp. Something had hissed past her cheek, over Silpheed's head, and the stinging sensation that it left on her skin felt like a paper cut. Caught off-guard, they were once again on the ground, collapsing through the bushes with a slip of the skates.

Sara found herself eye-to-toe with someone's grubby foot, Silpheed having retreated to the nearest tree limb to escape the threat. Chocolate bars littered the ground around her, as well as bits of severed crest feathers.

The duelist in rags stared down at her from the tip of his nose, locked in some sort of battle stance. "Who are you?" he demanded. "How dare you intrude in the middle of my training!"

"Hey, hey, easy there, buddy!" said Sara, pulling down the latex beak. "We don't look for trouble; trouble looks for us, a-ha!" She tried to smile to prove that she was indeed a buddy, only to flinch by the sting in her cheek. Her fingertips revealed small smears of blood as soon as she pulled them away from the throbbing scratch.

"D'oh. Eh-heh…ah, you got us good, didn't ya? Well, I'm sure you didn't mean to hit us; we like throwing things, too! Silpheed, see if you can fetch this guy's…um, whatever he threw at us, will you?"

Respond to contempt with kindness, to hostility with hospitality, to frost with warmth: what better way to sell chocolate?

"_RAWK!" _Silpheed hadn't survived the ordeal without an injury of his own, to his body image. His lovely crest was now in shambles, and he was so racked with dismay that that was all he could say about it. But for the sake of selling a candy bar, he did as he was told, dropping the card over the stranger's head before quickly retreating back into the tree to hide the shame of a ruined crest. The duelist's reflexes were impeccable, almost like a ninja's. A snap broke the air as he trapped the card in his fingers.

Sara fumbled around the grass for a chocolate bar, waving it by the stranger's knee. "We're, um, we're selling chocolate! Care for a bar?"

"_RAWK! _With or without nuts?"

The stranger still seemed distrustful of them. "You expect me to believe _that_? You might be a spy, sent to weed out my secrets to my enemy."

Had it not hurt to do so, Sara would've crammed her tongue into her cheek by that point. "What enemy? We're just an independent chocolate-selling group, friend. Oh, here!" She tore away the wrapper at the top of the bar, exposing the chocolate rectangle underneath. "How 'bout a free sample? If you try it, you might like it." Shuffling onto her knees, she broke off a piece and held it out to her customer.

The strange duelist plucked the chocolate out of her hand, examining it like a suspicious kitchen knife at the scene of a crime. "There's a chance that you may be offering me a poisoned chocolate bar. On the other hand…all of this training has left me a bit famished."

He sniffed the chocolate. Licked it. Nibbled a corner of it, then the other, and the other…and before long the entire chunk had vanished, and the duelist sucked his fingers clean.

"Hmm…your chocolate doesn't taste poisoned…so I'm assuming that you are indeed just a chocolate salesman; a rather poorly dressed salesman, at that. But I must say, thank you. I'll need all the nourishment I can get if I'm going to secure the victory and finally destroy my enemy." He proceeded to gather five chocolate bars off the ground and slide them each into his pockets.

Of course, Sara misinterpreted his smirk as a genuine sign of happiness, her face glowing with happiness of her own (and because her scratch was becoming inflamed). Five chocolate bars sold already! What a giant waddle down the path to stardom!

"Awesome-nity! That'll be five hundred yen, please!"

The stranger stopped to fire her a glazed look. "Excuse me?"

"Well, you wanted five chocolate bars, and each one is a hundred yen apiece. Five times a hundred yen is five hundred yen…I think," said Sara, like a little elementary girl solving a math problem. She pushed herself off of the ground and shook herself off. "Silpheed, isn't five times a hundred, five hundred?"

"Oh…you want payment?" he jeered, unlocking his duel disk as he assumed a sort of battle stance. "All right, I'll pay you, believe it, I'll pay you. I'll pay you by giving you the honor of being my practice target!"

The air around the clearing fell deathly still, the way it would seconds before a relentless battle commenced. Sara's honest response to it?

"Okay, so will that be cash or check?"

____________

The day had finally reared its head. In only a matter of hours, Syrus and Makoto would duke it out by the seaside, locked in a decisive battle over whose dojo was the most superior. In those final hours, Jaden had come to see Zane, to check on his progress while Syrus remained focused on his preparations.

Zane had to admit, while he was proud of Jaden for maturing as much as he had, it felt a bit alien at first to talk to him, perhaps because he had been so accustomed to that trademark twinkle in his eyes that it felt strange to see the edge that had replaced it. Perhaps it was because he didn't ask if he was going to finish his dinner. Either his appetite had been tamed, or it had just gained a sense of subtlety.

It didn't bother him that much, though. With everything he had been through, the boy had had to grow up eventually. Everyone had to.

Though that didn't necessarily mean that everyone _did. _

Besides, not everything about Jaden had changed. He still had his unfaltering loyalty to his friends, and dueling (that went without saying). In fact, it sounded as if he had been watching Syrus for those past few days.

"He's doing the best he can. He won't let you down, Zane, I know he won't." Something about the tone of his voice implied that he knew a little more than he let on. So far, the truth about Zane's deck had only been disclosed between him and his little brother.

But he wouldn't be Jaden if he didn't know things, would he…?

_Knock-ka-knock-ka-knock-knock! _

_Thud-dud! _

Zane only knew one person who knocked like that, and just as Jaden was rising from his seat, he told him, "Don't answer the door."

Jaden raised an eyebrow. "Why?"

"I just wouldn't open the door, if I were you." _She's like a pigeon: the more attention you feed her, the more she keeps coming back. _

Jaden stayed frozen for a moment or two, as though pondering what Zane had meant by that.

"What's wrong? Is someone bothering you?"

Zane was too proud to admit when he had a problem, particularly one as petty as Sara. Fortunately—or unfortunately—he didn't need to say a word; she made herself known by pressing her face against the window, her knuckles softly rapping on the glass. She always found a way to make herself known. Silpheed was with her, her red scarf over his head like a hood.

"Hey! Hey, Ziti! Hey, Jaden! How's it going?" The window muffled her voice, but not enough to quell it. She was too loud to be quelled.

Zane noticed the Band-aid on her left cheek, and how scuffed up she looked. The feathers of her cape were in disarray, her bucket-hat perched on the right side of her head. Latex beak dangling around her neck, her lips were sprung into a sort of half-smile, as if it pained her to show a full one, and her eyes were crossed, like she were coming down with a concussion.

She always acted like she was having a concussion.

What kind of trouble had she and the bird gotten into, this time?

Another part about Jaden that hadn't changed was that if someone knocked on the window, he was bound to answer. Perhaps that came with his role as a big hero? He undid the lock and swung the window open.

Predictably, she lunged in until only about a half-inch gap remained between the tips of their noses. "So how's it going, Jadey? Still playing the good game?" She blinked, peeking over his shoulder to give Zane a wave.

Jaden looked them up and down, a bemused smile teasing his lips. "Sure, the game is always good…are you all right? What happened to your face?" It seemed he still held that natural solicitude for others' welfare.

He might as well have launched a bottle rocket. "_Awesome-nity_ is what happened to our faces, fellas! We just started selling chocolate bars today, and we already sold _five, _all to this one guy we met out in the woods! He was so happy that he let us have the honor of being his practice targets!"

She paused. "Ziti, you're a rich guy, aren't ya? How much is that worth in yen?"

Jaden looked back at Zane, silently curious about the odd name she kept addressing him by. Meanwhile, Zane's hand twitched with the temptation to apply it to his face. It was one thing to get pushed around by stronger people, but to not even _know _that one had been pushed around…exuded such outrageous levels of pathetic that he only had two words for her:

"That's worthless."

A brief, uncomfortable silence plunged between the four of them. Sara appeared stunned. Even Silpheed had to peek out from under the scarf, having been uncharacteristically quiet the whole time.

"Whoa," breathed Sara. "Didja hear that, Silpheed? We scored a _fortune! _We're on our way!"

"Feathers…_RAWK! _Worthless…"

_Why do I even bother? _

"It's okay, Silph, they'll grow back. I know! I'll buy you a wig with the extra cash!" She dove into the box she had been lugging around with her throughout the day and wiggled a chocolate bar underneath Jaden's nose. "Would you boys like some chocolate? Only a hundred yen apiece!"

Zane figured that Jaden only said yes because he liked chocolate, and because he pitied the girl, ever the red-clad Samaritan. "Why not? I'll take one."

Sara grinned. "It's good to know that you haven't lost your sweet tooth!"

"_RAWK! _With or without nuts?"

Zane leaned over from his wheelchair and muttered, "Whatever you do, don't pick 'with nuts.'"

When Jaden looked back at him with a mute 'Why?', he answered, "Trust me: you'd just be setting yourself up for another banal dirty joke."

"How 'bout you, Ziti? A little choc-o-latey might do your heart some good! Wikipedia says so!" She said this as if Wikipedia were the fountain of all universal knowledge…one that happened to get its knowledge from random jerks surfing the Internet.

"No, thank you."

"Sorry, guys, but Zane doesn't eat chocolate." Why, oh why, did Jaden have to tell them that?

Sara cupped a hand over her mouth and gasped. "Un-possible! You! Have! Never! Eaten! Chocolate?! Silpheed, is it possible to string those words together like that? Mother of Mirth, no wonder you're always miserable! Here, just for you, we'll sell at _half _the price!"

Zane replied by wheeling his chair so he had his back turned towards them.

"Quarter of the price?"

Not even a snort. His eyes shifted towards the digital clock. 9:25. Thirty-five minutes left. He needed to start the trek to the beach now if he was going to see the duel. But there was no way he could hope to leave the room with those pests spazzing outside.

"Okay, Stubborn Stan, how about a free sample? Come on, don't knock it 'til you try it!" huffed Sara, something she hardly ever did. Something small and square sailed across the room, slicing the air like a butterknife—

_Thump!_

—and made contact with the top of his head. While it did no real physical damage, the instant it tapped him before plummeting to the floor, Zane tightened up like a spring, his grip on the arms of his wheelchair tightening until his knuckles lost their coloration.

"Oops. Th-That was s'posed to go in your lap."

"_RAWK! _No lay!" Silpheed squawked in dismay.

"Here, lemme try—"

"Ah, you know? I think you better go. It's late, and he's really not feeling too well. Here. Hope this helps." Jaden's pocket rattled as he fished for the two hundred yen to pay for both chocolate bars. That Jaden--always winding up having to save them all.

"Make sure he eats the chocolate, will you, Jaden? Ziti really needs it."

Oh, how he wished he could storm over to window and make _her_ pay, to show her that Zane Truesdale was not someone to throw chocolate bars at and make it out unscathed. But just a few seconds later, he relaxed…physically, anyway. She wasn't worth it. If she would allow others to run over her, to use her as a "practice target," she'd be slaughtered, one of these days…especially when—_if ever_—she found herself in the show-biz world. Eaten alive and spit out, as he had undergone so long ago.

And even if he did go through with hurting her, how could he? One couldn't accomplish very much in a goddamn wheelchair. He couldn't even make the journey to the beach without Jaden's assistance.

He had more important things to worry about, besides.

_**TO BE CONTINUED…**_

**_This chapter might not be very much, but I wanted to leave you guys something before I leave. My dad and I are heading off to Costa Rica, and I won't be around a computer for two weeks. _**

**_Adios, amigos! I'll miss you all! Hopefully, this new chapter is a decent parting gift. _**

**_Kudos to ChazzyLuverGurl for beta-reading on such short notice for me. _**


	10. Act Ten: Finale

_**Disclaimer! **__All fictional entities featured in this story belong to Kazuki Takahashi, except Sara Scinner and Silpheed, who are mine. Goodness, can you imagine the rental fees I pay to do this? This has been beta-read by ChazzyLuverGurl. _

_**ATTENTION! After several months on hiatus, I have decided to close this story with this final act. I kind of feel like a cop-out formatting it this way, considering all the effort I'd put into previous chapters, but I feel it's time to move on, to new things (aka, my new OC fic, "Story Of The Century." I know, right?). I'm not very good with endings, but I want to make it a habit to finish stories, so eventually, I'll at least be decent at it. **_

_**My sincerest apologies to all of you…and my sincerest thanks, as well. **_

_**PS: This is not of any real importance, but I believe I have picked a theme song for these two: "Lean On Me," by Bill Withers. **_

_**Act Ten**_

_It felt almost surreal for Zane to see his deck in play by someone else's hand, even if the hand was Syrus's. He could hardly believe how well the cards had been circulating under his brother's control since the duel had begun. The first few turns were a mirror to the unfinished battle from three nights before: Makoto had played DNA Denial Magic to keep Syrus from utilizing the deck's central combo. _

_From his place on the sidelines, Zane could see that he had been right about Syrus's rigorous training with his deck, evidenced by the rings of scratches that marred his small face and the frustrated clench in his teeth. The deck had already begun lashing out on his brother. It knew that the hands handling it were not Zane's. That his would no longer draw from it. _

_But Syrus hung on tight. In fact, he managed to make the very move that might've saved Zane if he had only the damn strength to make it himself: _

"_I activate Rebirth Judgment! Your DNA Denial Spell may keep Dragons from going to my Graveyard, but with this in play, I can select a monster-type, and all monsters already in our Graveyards become that type. I choose Dragon-type!" _

_Makoto cracked a sneer, but Syrus was far from finished. He flipped out a Spell from his hand: "Cyber Dark Impact! With this, I can take my Cyber Dark Horn, Keel and Edge from my Graveyard, add them to my deck, and Fusion-Summon Cyber Dark Dragon!" The lithe serpent sprang from mid-air with a howl as piercing as the whirlwind it left in its wake, whipping the faces of duelists and spectators. _

_**ATK: 1000**_

_**DEF: 1000**_

_Syrus raised a fist. "With Cyber Dark Dragon's special ability, I can choose a Dragon-type monster from my Graveyard and equip it to my Cyber Dark Dragon. Thanks to Rebirth Judgment, all my monsters in the Graveyard are Dragon-types. I choose…Cyber End Dragon!" _

_Zane's grip on his wheelchair tightened as he watched Cyber Dark attach itself to his former signature card, roaring with hunger as its Attack Points swelled up to 5000. Makoto, on the other hand, had quickly regained his cocky composure. In fact, the instant Cyber Dark Dragon had latched onto Cyber End, his smirk only grew broader. _

"_Like that's supposed to scare me. Well, runt, I happen to have a few tricks of my own. By sacrificing my Jinzo Returner, I spring my Trap, Crush Card Virus! Now for the next three turns, all the monsters on the field, in your hand, and that you draw will be destroyed if they have more than 1500 Attack Points!" _

_Syrus watched helplessly as Cyber Dark Dragon and Cyber End shattered into slivers of glass over his head. "No way!" _

"_Believe it, runt! Now, I demand that you show me your hand!" _

_Syrus complied. "Sorry, no monsters," he said behind his two Spells, trying his best to keep a straight face. Even so, Zane doubted that his brother had noticed his and Jaden's presence on the sidelines, yet. _

_Makoto just snickered. "No matter. Having sacrificed my Returner, I can now activate its special ability, in order to resurrect my Jinzo from the Graveyard!" The android arose in a curtain of hissing electricity that lit up the otherwise dark beach like a spotlight. _

_**ATK: 2400 **_

_**DEF: 1500**_

_Syrus narrowed his eyes at the grotesque creature. "You must've had this planned all along, didn't you? In the duel against my brother…" _

"_And why wouldn't I? Behold the signature monster of my dojo, with an ability that you should find unbelievable. As long as Jinzo is on the field, neither of us can activate Traps. In addition, any Traps active on the field…are negated. You know what that means, don't you?" _

_Rebirth Judgment…is now negated, thought Zane. Which means the monsters in either Syrus's or Makoto's Graveyards are no longer Dragon-types. _

_Syrus set the Cyber Phoenix, who was immune to the Virus, in Defense Mode. _

_**DEF: 1600**_

_Makoto tossed his head. "It's too bad that you only have the strategies you learned from your lame brother to fall back on. Not working so well for you, are they? I almost pity you. Almost." _

"_Makoto's got the upper hand, for now," said Zane quietly. "But my deck seems to be rotating well in Syrus's hands." _

_Jaden shook his head, a knowing smile playing at his lips. "You're wrong, Zane. Syrus isn't dueling with your deck." _

_All Zane could do was look at him. _

…

A faint ruckus snapped his neck up. Three days had passed since the decisive duel of the Dojos had commenced on the beach, and things had settled back into relative equilibrium. Of course, Zane had not taken the peace for granted. In the life he led, it was impractical to. Peace could be taken away as easily as it was given, and therefore should have been made the best of; namely, in which to replenish his strength so as to start over fresh.

The ruckus that tore Zane away from his meditation sounded like a distant wail, a soppy lamentation sung out of tune to the accompaniment of eardrum-slicing squawks. He was not alarmed. In fact, as soon as he heard it, he pinpointed the source long before he went to the window to draw open the blinds.

_Hn. I haven't seen those two in a couple of days. Now what're they doing? _

A certain girl in a Sonic Duck costume cycled aimlessly around the fountain out in the yard on her skates, her latex duck's bill bouncing about from her neck. Her cockatoo stayed perched on her shoulder as they sang in what looked like the throes of a sugar rush. By the sound of it, though, this was not just another Scinner-style happy-rush:

"_We're pitiful! We're pitiful! We're pitiful, it's true. 'Cause we ain't got it made—" _

"_Still can't get laid, RAWK!" _

"_And we don't know what to do. _

_Will we ever make our cue—whoa!" _

Sara lost her footing, typical of a sad, sugar-high fool who dared to skate under the influence. For a moment, the duo was swallowed in a swell of treated water. A moment later, Zane found them both sitting in the middle of the fountain like two drenched feather dusters, not even bothering to move as the waterworks cascaded over their heads like a liquid umbrella.

She looked dazed, confused. Under normal circumstances—the term "normal" used loosely—that wouldn't have surprised him. She had a knack of looking dazed and confused. But that crazed look on Sara's face washed away underneath the flow, replaced with a kind of confusion Zane didn't recall seeing on her face before, but knew too well from personal experience.

Her bright eyes became dull and clouded, fixed on her toes. The eyes of someone who'd lost something. Or perhaps, found something they wished they hadn't. By the way her face crumpled, she looked as though she'd just tried eating a pinecone.

He sighed, then wheeled over to the bathroom to lift a towel off the rack.

…

_Jaden was right. Syrus hadn't been dueling with his deck…at least, not exclusively. The instant Syrus drew this new card, Zane saw him freeze. A closer look revealed tears glistening in his eyes, but not tears of sadness. These were the tears of a sweet revelation trickling down his cheeks, evidenced by the small smile that brightened them. Tears that Zane had never been able to afford to express in the same way, but had felt nonetheless; perhaps the strongest he had ever felt that way. _

"_Syrus…" _

_Only then did Syrus turn his head to notice Zane and Jaden on the sidelines. When he did, he quickly wiped his damp eyes dry with his sleeve. "Zane!" _

"_What's the hold-up?" Makoto demanded. "How's about keeping the fluff outside the field, shall we? Dragonroid has 2900 Attack Points, so my Virus destroys it." _

_Syrus sent the monster to the Graveyard…and he couldn't have looked happier if he'd tried. "Zane! The deck! It came through for me!" _

_Feeling it too early, even unnecessary, for words, Zane remained quiet. But that didn't leave his knuckles any less whiter. _

"_What's that supposed to mean?" scoffed Makoto. _

"_Instead of explaining, let me give you a demonstration!" said Syrus with a determination that had taken him almost three painstaking years to cultivate. "First I play the Spell, Remove Bomb! I take the top five cards off the top of my deck, and for every one of them that happen to be monsters, you take 300 Points of direct damage!" _

_He showed Makoto the cards: two Spells, three monsters. Cyber Horn, Dark, and Keel. _

_Makoto drew back in furious disbelief. "Three monsters?! You must be joking!" _

"_Believe it, Ninja Boy! That's 900 Damage Points you're looking at!" _

_**BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! **_

_**Makoto's LP: 3100**_

_Makoto shielded his face against the triple blast. His Life Points, on the other hand, were not nearly as lucky. "So you knocked 900 Points off of me. Big deal!" _

"_Oh, but I'm just getting started. Next I play Spell Economics! Now I won't have to pay Life Points to play a Spell. Pretty cool, especially when you're playing a Spell like Dimension Fusion! Now we both get to summon as many monsters that had been removed from the game as we can onto the field. _

"_Normally, I'd have to pay 2000 Life Points to do this, but thanks to Spell Economics, I don't have to pay a one!" _

_Since Syrus had been the one losing monsters from the game, only he could take advantage of Dimension Fusion. Not that anyone was complaining (save for Makoto). Not Zane, and certainly not Syrus! _

_With Cyber Dark Horn, Edge and Heel on his side, Syrus went on to play one more Spell, the one card that connected him and Zane as duelists. And brothers. _

"_Go, Power Bond!" _

_Zane felt himself become rigid in his wheelchair. Could it be? Was there still potential left in his deck for such a combo? _

_Syrus paused for a moment to reflect, raising his head to look his opponent square in the eye. "Jaden…it's like what you told me. In order to duel with this deck, I had to listen to what it wanted. You're wrong, Zane. All this time, you thought you'd reached your limit, that you couldn't do better than you already have. But that's not true. It's just not true…" _

_Zane glanced over to his old rival, who only glanced briefly back and smiled. _

"_I'm nobody's poet. But you, me, Jaden…the truth is, there is no such thing as 'the best.' I mean, there's no limit to what we can do. We're always changing, evolving, just like our decks. Just like what your deck's been asking for all along." _

_Zane had had a feeling that Syrus would catch up to him someday. What he hadn't counted on, however, was that HE would become the one needing to catch up to Syrus. _

_And yet, he felt not a single qualm about it. In fact, it was then that Zane, for the first time since the duel had commenced—or perhaps the first time since he'd ever donned the black coat—began to relax. A strange feeling washed over him as he watched his brother go on to finish his move: a sort of peaceful release that lightened, if not yet lifted, the burden off his chest. One in which he hadn't felt in so long, he'd all but forgotten its name. _

_A feeling that etched a tiny smile into his lips. _

"_Would you look at that? He did it. He's taken my deck and managed to make it his own, but at the same time…" _

_Cyber Dark Dragon howled over Syrus's head once again, glowing with vigor as its Attack Points rocketed to 2000 by the effects of Power Bond. _

_Makoto just cocked his head and smirked. "2000 Attack Points? That's not enough to destroy me!" _

"_Maybe, but you're forgetting something: Cyber Dark Dragon can take a Dragon-type monster from my Graveyard and absorb its Attack Points." _

_The mere mentioning of this drew a bullet of sweat from the ninja duelist's temple. Suddenly, he didn't appear as confident as he would've liked. "Y-you can't do that! YOU'RE forgetting something: you have no Dragon-types monsters in your Graveyard!"_

_Syrus snatched up a card from his Graveyard, his eyes hardening. "You know what? You're right: I did forget something. I forgot to tell you that Dragonroid may be a Machine-type, but it's treated as a Dragon-type monster when it's sent to the Graveyard under any circumstances! For a ninja, I'm a little surprised you didn't see that coming." _

_If it were even possible, Makoto's unruly mane stood on end. _

_**ATK: 4900**_

"_Oh yeah, one more thing: Cyber Dark has a second effect that gives it 100 Attack Points for every monster in my Graveyard! Let's see: nine monsters…that's 900 extra Attack Points!" _

_**ATK: 5800**_

_Cyber Dark Dragon and his new duelist had never looked more powerful, especially to the one on the receiving end of the impending attack they immediately followed up with. "No! You can't! If I lose, th-then my…my Dojo…" _

"_Sorry, man, but you shouldn't have picked a fight with us if you really cared about your dojo. All right, Cyber Dark! Attack his Jinzo Lord and finish this duel!" _

_Zane didn't move an inch until the storm passed over and the smoke cleared, when Makoto lay exhausted and humiliated on his back, and Syrus suddenly lurched over, gasping for air. But he remained on his feet. _

_He helped him up by giving him something he hadn't given anyone in such a long time. _

_He clapped. _

…

"Get out of the fountain, Sara. You're just making a fool of yourself." _More than you usually do. _

Sara peered up from underneath the cascade, as did Silpheed. "That's our job," she mumbled, barren of gaiety compared to any other occasion. To prove her point, she flapped her drenched cape like wings, like a duck having a splash in a pond.

Unable to take flight, Silpheed fluttered over and latched his beak against the side of the fountain and tried to pull himself out, only to slip right back in when his feet could find no secure footing. Sara knelt in to pick up the shivering bird and place him outside, before clamoring out herself, her head as heavy and dripping as the clothes that hang off her.

As she tried to get up on her feet, her knees buckled from the lack of support under her feet. She almost instantly found herself on her way back on the concrete. She would've made impact had Zane not reached out to catch her by the wrist.

Sara pushed herself up with her free hand. "Thanks, Ziti," she murmured, still not looking up at him as she sat down on the edge of the fountain. Rather than use the towel he gave her on herself, Sara wrapped it around her squirming bird-friend and gently patted him dry. She dug her finger into his crest feathers to ruffle them a little.

She sat Silpheed down with the towel still around him. In the meantime, she began to wring out her cape, her scarf, her hair. As she took off her bucket-hat, she eyed the top of it, suddenly turning white with dismay as she trailed a finger around the black smudges that used to be words. A name.

Ojaman's autograph had washed away.

Sara wiped it up with her elbow. "Sorry if we're bugging you, Ziti," she said softly. "Guess we better go hit the dusty trail."

Zane arched an eyebrow. "That's it? No half-wit comeback? No half-baked joke? What's wrong?"

Sara and Silpheed finally looked up at him, but neither would say a word. A true sign of a calamity (the definition of "calamity," of course, remained subjective). Instead, Zane could see her eyes shining, with tears.

She shielded them with her forearm. "Nothin'."

Zane folded his arms across his chest. "I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. The Sara I know would at least go out of her way to avoid clichés."

He saw her shudder. Whether it was a sob or a weak laugh, he couldn't tell. He never could tell with Sara.

"I just…I don't think I should talk about it. It's…it's too sad. We came here to fix our hearts, not break yours more than it already is."

"Dirty Mike! _RAWK!_"

Sara looked at Silpheed.

"I think I can handle it, Scinner. I've been around. I've dealt with a lot more than you might realize."

Sara rubbed her eye out with her knuckles and took a deep, shaky breath. "Ojaman hung up his trunks. He's gone back to being Chazz."

Syrus had said something about Aster Phoenix's comeback duel against his "former student." Had Chazz come back to his senses? "How is that sad?"

Sara crammed her tongue into her cheek. "Well, i-that's not really sad in itself. If it makes him happy, then we have no room to say otherwise. It's just that…he was such a great comedian, and…we were hoping that we could've been funny buddies, and—"

"Dirty Mike! _RAWK!_"

Something more must've happened during the duel. Something that Sara fought desperately to deny or rationalize or whatever it was she did…and was failing.

…

"_Mike? Mike! Hey, Mikey! W-wait up!" _

_Silpheed clung for dear life as Sara raced down the steps, their box of unsold candy bars swinging at her side. She called after him amidst the roar of the crowd, who had instantly shifted their attention to the duelists duking it out on the arena. This time, holding nothing back. _

"_Cap'n Pink Underpants! RAWK!" _

"_Where're you going, Mike?" _

_The producer turned his head to glare at the two of them, not looking nearly as charismatic as he had the last time they had met. It was rather hard to be, since he was currently being led out of the arena by guards on every side of him. In his underwear, no less. _

"_You again? Where does it look like I'm going?" _

"_Y-you're coming back, aren't you?" _

_Mike's scowl melted into a full-blown sneer that almost stopped Sara in her tracks. "Does it LOOK like I'm coming back? Jus—just get outta here, kid!" At the slightest hint of hesitation, the men in black and shades shoved him forward. Mike scowled at them, but kept moving with an ever-growing slump in his posture. _

_Sara blinked once, twice, thrice. _

_What'd just happened…? _

"_B-b-but Mikey! What about—we still haven't—" _

_Mike turned back to look at them one last time. "Well, I guess it's off, then, isn't it?" he hissed, the stray perch of hair bouncing over his glazed eyes. _

_Gradually slowing down to a walk, Sara stopped chasing him altogether. She watched Jaden and the cat Pharaoh run after him, carrying Ojaman's empty yellow head in his arms like a gourd, his once springy eye-stalks now hanging limp and lifeless. _

_Candy bars scattered around her feet as the box crashed onto the linoleum. _

_Silpheed turned to look over the blank-faced girl, none the wiser, none the richer. "Sara…?" _

…

"How could somebody so cheery and nice do something so—so…mean, so…selfish?"

"Welcome to the real world, Sara," said Zane, waiting for her ego to make its last stand against painful reality.

She looked down at Silpheed, who had fallen almost as uncharacteristically silent as she had. His black, beady eyes became almost as dull as her green ones. "That—that can't be right. There's gotta be a mistake. M-maybe he was holding onto that card for safe-keeping, and—and he just forgot to give it back to Aster?"

"Don't you think, if that were the case, that he wouldn't have tried to bring Chazz down with him?"

Jaden's words echoed in her ears: how Mike had pulled such a dirty trick in order to force Aster into early retirement (which only proved Zane right: Phoenix would never retire so soon without the influence of circumstances beyond his control). He could see it in the way her face chipped away, piece by piece. She didn't want to believe it. She would not believe such a nice guy could turn out to be a crooked, manipulative slimeball. But, when had Jaden ever been wrong?

She rested her jaw in the palms of her hands. "He made Aster unhappy. He made Chazz unhappy by making him throw the duel, even though it made everyone laugh. And yet, once it came out that he threw it, everyone was unhappy, too. And when Chazz quit being Ojaman…everyone seemed so happy, than they were before."

Sara proceeded to rub circles into her temples. "Gah, I just don't know, anymore, Ziti! We just don't know…" She glanced up at Zane as if she expected him to have an answer…whatever exactly her question was.

Deep down, Sara wasn't a bad person. Just terribly misguided: clinging to childish inclinations in her search for happiness while everyone else had begun to grow up. While it was good that she finally started to get on the train (better to do it now than to do it when she'd become far too involved with the likes of Mike), Zane certainly didn't feel elated to see her so broken about it.

…

"_Listen, Sy. I've been thinking…" _

_Syrus wheeled his brother up the hill back to the infirmary after everything had been said and done, every move had been made. "Y-yeah?" His eyes were still shining with residual tears. Some things, Zane supposed, would probably never change. _

_Zane turned to look back at his brother, still glowing with the overwhelming pride he held for him. "This might sound like a stretch, but…I think we should start a new Pro League." _

_That alone stopped Syrus cold in his tracks. _

"_A…are you sure, Zane?" he breathed, having always been used to the older one's cool rationality. "You've just only given me your deck; do you really want to make such a huge step?" _

_Zane nodded. He had never felt more certain of anything thus far. "The current system is faulty. It imposes limits on duelists and won't allow room for improvement. It might take us awhile, but I think we can change that, you and I. What do you say?" _

_Not having had the chance to cool off himself, fresh tears streamed down Syrus's cheeks. He flashed Zane a watery smile. "That does sound like a stretch…b-but I think that's a stretch worth making. I'll do it, Zane! I-I will! Thank you!" He quickly shielded his face in his forearm as he fought to swallow his sobs. _

No, Syrus. Thank _you._

…

Hope: what a strange feeling. If it lifted one high enough, they felt compelled to reach out to the most unlikely of people in turn. In their own way, of course.

"Wh-what's it all mean? H-have we been wasting our time? Have we been going at it all wrong?" blubbered Sara. It'd only taken one blatant blow from reality to send her punch-drunk. "I mean, we still want to make people happy, but not if it means…" Her face found its way back into her hands, either unwilling or unable to complete her sentence. Silpheed waddled up to Sara's leg and pressed his head against her shin.

"Well," said Zane, "maybe you'll need to try a different approach."

"But we don't have anything else, Ziti. We're born fools. That's all we know."

"_RAWK! _Born to be idiots!"

A momentary but thick silence draped over the three, ruffled only by the soft roar of the fountain behind them. Believe it or not, Zane decided to break it first:

"That's not true."

Tickled by mild surprise, Sara and Silpheed looked up at him.

She still had time, even as a third-year nearing graduation. Why, it'd been almost three years since he'd graduated himself, only to find that he still had so much to learn outside of school.

"Listen. I want you to do something for me."

Sara rubbed her eye. "Get lost?"

"No. I want you…to go back. Forget Mike. Forget cheap tricks. You don't have to cheapen yourself and your deck in order to find happiness."

She crammed her tongue into her cheek. "So…what? Are we supposed to just go for the win? Winning's not everything."

Zane shook his head. "It may not be everything. You won't win every time, even if you try. But promise me…that you will learn something when you lose, and you will follow through. Don't back down. Give someone—and yourself—a duel to remember. If you're willing to pay attention, see how much of a difference it makes. Just…try that for awhile."

He could see it in the way her eyes crossed: her trying to wrap her mind around this new aspect. Then:

"Could I keep the costume?"

Well, when it all boiled down to it, the clothes didn't make the duelist. He couldn't tell her to change everything. He couldn't tell her to do _any_thing, really, and expect her to follow it. "Yeah. Whatever."

Sara wobbled as she began to stand up. "How're you feeling now, Ziti?"

"I'm on my way," he replied, deeming it a sufficient answer.

"Do…do you want us to duel you sometime?" A lopsided smile shook at her lips.

Silpheed, who had lost the towel, ruffled his disheveled plumage.

Zane paused for a moment to think it over. He didn't feel it necessary to tell her what he was currently planning to do with his brother. At least, not yet. He wanted to go far, but not too far, too fast.

"…Fine. But on one condition. I don't want you to challenge me until you know, without a doubt, that you are ready. That you will not hold back. That you will not use any cheap—"

She didn't hold back. He hardly got to finish his sentence when Sara, without warning, lunged at him to put him in a headlock. He instantly braced himself for the noogie, but it never came. Instead, Sara kept her arms locked around his neck as she rested her chin on his shoulder. She started making a noise that Zane couldn't quite tell was sobbing or chuckling; both, perhaps? It didn't make it any less awkward, especially since she was still pretty wet. The drenched green feathers from her cape tickled his nostrils.

"Awesome-nity! You really are a good guy, Ziti," she said hoarsely. "Thank you." Zane grunted as her hold on him tightened. Did she always have to make it seem as though she wanted to kill him?

"Yeah, sure. You can let go of me, now," he said with a frown. And after a few more achingly slow seconds, she did.

But not without blessing him. With a kiss.

It was nothing serious: a mere peck in the center of his forehead. That did not make it any less uncalled for, however. When she pulled away, he told her, "Don't push it, Sara."

The previous whiteness in her face bled into a delighted flush. "Find happiness, Ziti. I hope we all find it someday, underneath all the pinecones." She stooped over to take Silpheed into her arms. "Come on, Silpheed! It's time to stop moping, and—and—and start cleaning up our act! G'bye, Ziti! Catch you again!"

Silpheed flapped his wings. "Come up 'n' see me, sometime! _RAAAAWK!_"

She hopped the gate surrounding the fountain and skated off into the shifting shadows of dusk. Well, at least she wasn't the type to waste time moping.

Zane watched her go, lifting up two fingers to press against his forehead, where she'd pecked him. Never had he felt more fortunate that no one had seen that, especially not Atticus. He would've never heard the end of it.

He closed his eyes, shaking his head. _Crazy kid. _

_**END**_

**_I wished the ending could have been more definitive. But is that not what life is like? Yesterday cannot be changed, tomorrow never knows. Life never ends. Hopefully, neither does love. _**


End file.
